Aftermirth

I STOPPED BEING FUNNY the day my wife was electrocuted by her underwire bra.

You must have seen it on the news, some Ken-and-Barbie anchor team struggling not to let a hint of morbid amusement crack the thinly applied veneer of sympathy on their faces as they listened to the fulminologist (“That’s science speak for someone who studies lightning,” Barbie said, with a those wacky scientists waggle of her eyebrows) from Stanford University explain how it had happened. Contrary to popular belief, he said, metal worn on the body does not attract lightning. “Well, I’m sure a whole lot of women will be relieved to hear that!” Ken exclaimed, with a sidelong glance at busty Barbie. “Yes, and anyone who wears a wristwatch,” the fulminologist said, obviously annoyed at being interrupted. He went on to explain that since my wife (“the victim”) was found directly beneath a tree that had been struck by lightning and had not been hit directly herself, one could assume that the current had jumped from the tree to her in a “side splash,” a phenomenon that accounts for 30 percent of all lightning injuries but is rarely fatal. It was in my wife’s case, because of the two curved pieces of nickel titanium supporting her breasts, which conducted the current and stopped her heart. “Freakish,” said Ken and Barbie, with crinkled foreheads and mournful shakes of their heads. “Tragic. What a thing.”

You probably saw the headlines in some of the trashier papers too: BOLT SLAYS BUXOM BROOKLYNITE and FOR COMEDIAN’S WIFE, DD PROVES DOUBLE DEADLY. The worst was LIGHTNING STRIKES TWIN TOWERS, hardy har har. I would have loved to have gotten my hands on the clever son of a bitch who wrote that one, and the other piece of garbage who dug up the photo some paparazzi took of Jess in a bikini on our honeymoon in Costa Rica. Her head’s thrown back and she’s laughing at something I said, but the way they cropped the shot I bet her smile wasn’t what you noticed.

Not that I could blame anyone for noticing. My wife had magnificent breasts. They were smooth and luminous and almost perfectly round; two soft, heavy moons capped by nipples like rose quartz marbles. Atomic nipples, I used to call them, because they were so irrepressible. The slightest touch or breeze would stiffen them. Jess actually had to wear padded bras to hide them, an irony whose hilarity was lost on her. She hated being large-breasted, hated the catcalls and lascivious stares, the sly insinuations of other women that she’d had implants, the difficulty in finding clothes that fit without drawing even more attention to her amplitude. She wanted to have reduction surgery, but I talked her out of it. That’s the real knee-slapper: if I hadn’t loved my wife’s breasts so much—their softness, the sweet heft of them in my hands—she might still be alive.

You know that spot between a woman’s breasts where the scent of her settles, distilled to its most intoxicating form? That was my favorite place on earth. I could lie for hours in exquisite near-suffocation, my nose pressed against Jess’s breastbone, my face harbored by the pliant orbs of her flesh. I knew I wasn’t the first man to have berthed there, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that unlike all those other poor schmucks, I had been granted a permanent mooring, a lifelong lease to wallow in Jessness.

But permanent is a lie we tell ourselves and each other. And lifelong turned out to be less than four years.

I HEARD JESS before I ever saw her. It was the spring of 2006, and I was living in LA. I’d been out there for six months, licking my wounds after having failed to make the cut at SNL. My agent had gotten me a gig at the Ice House in Pasadena, which was a big deal for me then. I was up fourth and the two comics before me were lame, so by the time I took the stage the audience was restless and scenting blood. I got off to a rocky start. I could feel them slipping out of my grasp, preparing to turn on me, when a woman in back laughed, startling me to momentary silence. It was a sound like nothing I’d ever heard: artless, weightless, utterly abandoned. I told another joke, and she laughed again, a bright, rippling arpeggio from the most joyful aria ever sung. I peered into the audience but couldn’t see her; as always, the stage lights turned everyone beyond the first few rows into an amorphous horde of humanity. I kept telling jokes, wanting only to keep hearing that glorious laugh, and before long I felt myself entering what I call the drop zone, becoming more audacious, inventing fresh material that was twice as good as the prepared stuff I’d walked onstage with. It was all for her, but the rest of them were laughing too, helplessly and uproariously, laughter like I’d only gotten a few times in my whole career, when the audience was packed with family and friends. I wasn’t just funny that night, I was the god of funny, and she was my angel.

And then my run was over, and the audience was roaring as I took my bows and bounded off the stage into the wings, where I received a high five from Jimmy, the club’s manager, and a tight, go-fuck-yourself smile from Ethan Cohen, the headliner who was up after me. I was supposed to get the crowd nice and moist for him, not bring them off. I gave him an apologetic shrug. On any another night I might have enjoyed his irritation, but the crowd’s adulation made me magnanimous. I was Caesar and they were the mob, and for long moments I just stood there, sweaty and ebullient in my crown of laurel, bathing my swelling ego in the warm gush of their love. The laughing mystery woman may have kicked things off, I thought, but I was the one who’d made the ninety-nine-yard punt return. Still, I owed her a big thank-you, and I couldn’t wait to give it to her. I would go out front during Cohen’s act and listen for the sound of her laugh. It would lead me to her like a homing beacon.

Unless.

I felt a welling of panic. What if she didn’t find his big Jewish dick schtick funny? Which she very well might not; it didn’t exactly double me over. Or what if she had to be somewhere, had to work the night shift or take the dog out, and she didn’t even stay for his act? She could be walking out the door at this very second, and I didn’t even know what she looked like.

Jimmy’s hand on my arm brought me back to the moment. He jerked his head in the direction of the stage. The crowd was shouting for an encore. I was so grateful and relieved I could have French-kissed each and every one of them. When I stepped back onstage they erupted. I waited for them to subside and then asked for the houselights to be turned up—something I normally only did when I was scrambling for laughs and needed some people in the audience to make fun of. I took a perfunctory swipe at a pudgy bald guy with a blonde half his age and another at a table of drunken twenty-somethings having a bachelorette party. I got some laughs, but not the one I wanted.

I launched into my encore. It was one joke, a long lead-in to a big payoff, and as I told it I scanned the audience, searching for a face that could possibly belong to that laugh. I rejected one after the other. The brunette with dimples: too sorority-girl. The tall streaked blonde: impossible, my angel didn’t wear leopard-print halter tops. The redhead cozied up to the guy with twenty-inch biceps: please God, let that not be her.

And then I spotted her: twinkling blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face framed by a mass of wavy, honey-brown hair. She smiled at me, a teasing, see-you-backstage smile, the kind I got from a handful of women at almost every show. Not because I’m some hunk—I bear an uncanny nonresemblance to Brad Pitt—but because women think that if you’re funny you’ll be good in bed (and for the record, I always did my best to bear out this assumption).

I’d received hundreds of smiles like that, and I’d come hither to my fair share of them, but none of them had ever made my heart lurch and my knees wobble like hers did. I stared straight at her as I delivered the punch line. She opened her mouth—and brayed, a piercing, nasal hee-haw that went on and on before culminating in a loud snort.

It wasn’t her.

My eyes moved further down her table, to the source of the sound I’d been listening for. There, producing gales of sublime, irresistible laughter, sat a plain-faced middle-aged woman wearing an oversized sweater that hung on her like a sack. That’s what I saw, and that’s all I saw, shallow bastard that I was then. This—this was my angel?

Numbly, I thanked the audience and made my way offstage and toward the exit, ignoring kudos and back slaps and even half a dozen offers of free beers; that’s how stunned and disappointed I was. I didn’t look in her direction, but her laughter seemed to pursue me through the club, mocking me. And it didn’t stop at the door. It followed me home and took up residence, haunting my dreams and troubling my waking moments. I heard it at the gym, in restaurants, on the street, always behind me or off in the distance, a siren’s tease promising joy like I’d never known in my whole empty, pathetic life. Joy, I was painfully aware, that I’d walked away from like an adolescent fool.

I heard her laughter everywhere except onstage. I listened for it after every joke and scoured every face in every audience in search of her, but she remained silent, absent. My act started to suffer. I stumbled through three gigs in a row and showed my hairy naked ass at the Improv like I hadn’t done since I was a baby comic doing fart jokes at airport Hiltons. There’s nothing more humiliating than the moment when your death throes become so anguished and unseemly that the crowd starts to feel sorry for you and the women let out embarrassed little titters that are worse than the deafening silence they’re meant to break.

I had a big show coming up at the Downtown Comedy Club that I’d been looking forward to for weeks, but now I was dreading it. Scouts from The Daily Show were going to be there, and so was my agent, who’d called a couple of days after the Improv fiasco and let me know, ever so nonchalantly, that she was planning to drop by. No doubt she’d gotten an earful about my recent spate of unfunniness. I couldn’t afford to choke again.

I was backstage waiting to go on, sweating like a margarita in Death Valley and kicking myself for not bringing a spare shirt, when I heard it: a brief, radiant trill like a shimmer of light on water. I went still and cocked my whole being to listen, praying it was her and not her ghost, silently beseeching the gay comic onstage to go somewhere funny with his endless rant about fat cells. And by some miracle he did, and my angel laughed again, and I was delivered. I don’t remember a thing about my act that night. Jess said I was brilliant, and I must have been pretty damn good because a week later I was in New York auditioning for Jon Stewart, but all I can recall is the sight of her face beaming up at me from the second row. How had I ever thought she was plain? She was beautiful, in the way that a mesa is beautiful, or a pine tree: perfectly unadorned, made just as it should and must be. And the more she laughed the more beautiful she became, until by the end of my act I could hardly stand to look at her, or not to. When I took my bows she stopped laughing and gazed straight back at me with wide, luminous eyes. Her face filled the frame, filled the universe.

We were married six months later, which was about five months too long for me, but Jess wanted to wait; to be sure we were sure. She said it was because of the age difference—she was thirty-seven, six years older than me—but I think it went deeper than that. Our connection had been so instantaneous and strong it felt like a magic trick, and Jess needed to poke at it to be sure it wouldn’t vanish in a puff of smoke. In the meantime she came to all my shows, fueling me, feeding me with her delicious, infectious laughter. My audiences got bigger, and my name moved to the top of the slate. At her urging, I wrote a couple of pilots for shows that had been rattling around in my head for a while: a sitcom called Pet Court and a dramedy called Trainers. I didn’t get the Daily Show gig, but I landed an American Express campaign, which led to a couple of man-on-the-street skits for Leno, which led to a four-episode guest slot on The Office. Then HBO said yes to the pilot of Trainers, and we shot it and they greenlighted the show, and Jess and I packed up and moved to New York. She’d never been here before, and seeing my hometown through her eyes made it wondrous, an enchanted forest of towering stone through which we wandered with the eagerness of children, casting bread crumbs in our favorite spots: the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, the roof garden at the Met, the gelato stand on the Hi Line, the midpoint of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset.

Jess fell in love with Cobble Hill, so we bought a brownstone and spent a happy year feathering it to her taste. Hers, because I had none of my own. I’d lived a typical bachelor’s existence; when I met Jess my worldly possessions consisted of a bed, a threadbare sofa I’d pulled off the curb, a plastic patio table and chairs, some IKEA bookshelves and a humongous three-thousand-dollar flat screen. Suddenly I had flower vases and napkin rings, occasional tables and bedskirts—bedskirts!—and a set of those little yellow corn prong things. I had unmoldering vegetables in the fridge, tampons under the bathroom sink and long brown hairs on the new five-hundred-thread-count pillowcases. And I had softness everywhere: sofa cushions that were like sinking into pudding, plush towels that hadn’t been swiped from hotel rooms, sheer curtains that gentled the light, Jess’s hair and skin and mouth, her fingers stroking my back, the warm sigh of her breath against my neck.

Even our dog was soft, a springer spaniel mix we adopted from the ASPCA. We named him Izzy, after Eddie Izzard, Jess’s second-favorite comic. She was walking Izzy down Clinton Street when the lightning bolt struck her.

FADE IN:

INT. KITCHEN - DAY

MICHAEL LARSSEN, 34, is standing in a well-appointed open kitchen, chopping carrots in time with the cheerful tune he’s HUMMING. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt that says “I’m with stupid” over an arrow pointing down. Every few seconds he looks up and gazes with eager expectation at the front door, like the love of his life is about to walk through it any minute. He’s so distracted he cuts his finger with the knife.

MICHAEL

(good-naturedly)

Ow!

As he sucks his finger, there’s a loud RUMBLE of THUNDER. Surprised, Michael glances at the open window in the living room. The sky is darkening, and the branches of the trees outside are whipping back and forth. The wind begins to MOAN.

INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY

Michael strides toward the window, but before he reaches it there’s a loud THUNDERCLAP and it starts pouring rain. He closes the window then turns and looks back at the front door, worried now. A deafening CRACK of lightning sounds, followed by the unearthly HOWLING of a dog in the distance. Michael freezes and cocks his head, listening. Worry changes to recognition, then terror.

EXT. BROOKLYN BROWNSTONE - DAY

A torrential downpour. The door to the brownstone flies open and Michael runs down the steps. He takes off in the direction of the HOWLING. An ambulance SIREN wails in the distance.

EXT. CLINTON STREET - DAY

Michael, drenched to the skin, running flat-out in the pouring rain. The HOWLING fades away, and the SIREN gets louder. He sees a CROWD of a dozen people clustered on the sidewalk next to a smoldering tree that’s been hit by lightning. He runs up and pushes through them. A FIGURE is lying on the ground, its face and torso covered by an orange windbreaker: a woman, wearing jeans and pink Converse sneakers. Michael falls down on his knees beside her.

MICHAEL

Jess! Oh no, oh please God no!

He reaches out to lift the jacket, but a burly GUY in gym clothes takes his arm, restraining him.

GUY

No, man, don’t. You don’t want to see.

WOMAN

(whispering loudly)

It’s him, it’s Michael Larssen!

In a frenzy of grief, Michael flails out, yanking his arm from the guy’s grip, and starts to lift the jacket. His face contorts as the smell of burned flesh reaches him. He puts his hand over his mouth and nose and gags. With the help of a second MAN, the guy pulls Michael away from Jess’s body. He doubles over and vomits. The guy holds his shoulders, not letting go.

The ambulance arrives, and Michael wipes his mouth with his hand and staggers to his feet. The ear-piercing WAIL of the SIREN stops and two PARAMEDICS leap out. As they bend to their work, the guy grabs Michael and holds him in a death lock, rocking him like a baby and muffling the sound of Michael’s KEENING against his chest.

They found Izzy huddled in a stairwell almost a mile away, quaking and terrified. The police had to drive me down there to get him; he wouldn’t let anybody else near him. It was weeks before he could go outside without shaking like an epileptic, and a year later he still whimpered and trembled in his sleep. I often wondered if I did too, if I kept him awake sometimes like he did me. But Izzy couldn’t tell me, and there was nobody else I could ask.

WE WERE IN the middle of shooting the third season of Trainers when Jess died, and we still had four episodes left to write. The studio aired what we had in the can and gave me six months to pull myself together, and then another six after that. But at the year mark, compassion began to give way to pleading from my agent, manager, fellow writers and cast members, and impatience and talk of breach of contract from the studio brass and their lawyers. The show had won two Emmys the first year and four the second, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. It was an ensemble, but in the Seinfeld mode; without its outstanding star and head writer, there was no series.

I tried, I really did. I shot the final six episodes of season three, and I was prepared to man up and do four and five, but I didn’t have to, because I was so spectacularly unhilarious that HBO pulled the plug and released me from my contract. One weekend, as an exercise in masochism, I sat drinking vodka gimlets—Jess’s favorite cocktail—and watched the whole series from beginning to end, the thirty episodes that sang and the six that clanked. I started at noon on a Saturday and finished at dawn the next day. The Michael Larssen of episodes one through thirty was a stranger, a wise-ass doppelgänger who hailed from some other, weirdly gleeful planet. The Michael Larssen of thirty-one through thirty-six, the one who could have starred in Night of the Living Dead with minimal help from makeup and wardrobe, I knew all too well. The gimlets turned him into a merciful blur.

After Trainers wrapped I took my career off the oxygen and let it die. I got a few calls from old friends offering me a toe back in the water, but I turned them down, as much for their sakes as mine. The reek of my misery would only have stunk up their clubs and writers rooms, just like it did the apartments of my friends and family. I quit answering the phone, and after a while it stopped ringing much. The ones who were persistent I shoved away with sarcasm and, when that didn’t work, in-their-face rudeness. Their worry was a burden I couldn’t carry, because the only way to assuage it was to fake an alrightness I didn’t feel.

About a year and a half after Jess died my old friend Annie, with whom I’d periodically shared benefits in my single days, called and invited me over for a home-cooked meal, and afterward (I realized afterward), for mercy sex. Her bedroom was dark—she’d turned the lamp off in what I later understood was another act of kindness—but she felt wrong, smelled wrong. The little cries she made were too breathy and high-pitched. I soldiered on, determined to please her and to feel pleasure, and I guess I succeeded; at least, our bodies said I had. But as I lay spent beside her all I wanted was to go home and shower and fall into the oblivion of sleep, and Annie was a good enough friend that she understood and let me, sending me off with a pan of leftover lasagna and a chaste kiss on the forehead.

Izzy’s was the only company I could stand, because he let me be as morose as I liked and never asked, “So, how are you really, Michael?” Still, he had needs, and there were times I resented him so much for forcing me out of bed, out the door and into the Jessless world that I would yank him away from his pleasures, at which point he’d give me this look that said, What kind of jerk would deny his loyal, long-suffering—and you know how I’ve suffered—companion the simple joys of sniffing other dogs’ butts and rolling in squirrel shit? And I would be flooded with shame and let him walk me for a good hour and cook him bacon when we got home.

Home was still the brownstone, despite the efforts of my family and every other person who was still speaking to me to get me to move. They thought it was morbid that I would want to stay so close to the place where Jess had been killed. What they didn’t understand was that it would have been even worse being somewhere she hadn’t hung pictures and made pumpkin bread, watched South Park and done the Sunday crossword, slept and dreamed and waked and laughed and breathed.

Which is why, six weeks before the second anniversary of her death and a few days after my accountant called to inform me that I was nearly broke and would have to sell the brownstone if I didn’t start producing some income, I found myself opening a newspaper for the first time in nearly two years in search of some sort of gainful employment. I didn’t go straight to the job listings, though; I read the whole paper, feeling a lot like Rip Van Winkle. There’d been populist revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, apparently, and a second (and when was the first?) volcano eruption in Iceland on the same day that the world was supposed to end and hadn’t (and why the hell hadn’t it?).

And then I saw the headline in the Metro section: WORKER KNEADED TO DEATH IN BREAD FACTORY MISHAP. Julio Santiago, forty-six, an employee at the Fulsome Grains factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, had fallen into the giant dough vat unobserved by his co-workers. It wasn’t until the machine jammed that they’d discovered his body. This was the Times, so the article was straightforward, with no snickering. Still, at the end it said that the cause of death had been asphyxiation, not pummeling by dough blades. So why that misleading headline, KNEADED TO DEATH, with the cartoon visual it conjured? Was that not a sly attempt at humor? Feeling a growing anger, I went online to the Daily News website. Those pricks didn’t even try for subtlety. WORKER BATTERED IN DOUGH VAT ACCIDENT DOESN’T RISE, they quipped. I skipped the gory details and carefully scripted professions of regret by company officials and went to the end of the article. Mr. Santiago was survived by a wife, Pilar, and a daughter, Elena. The viewing was being held in two days at a funeral parlor in Passaic.

I would go and pay my respects.

As soon as I’d made the decision I was seized by restlessness. I straightened the house, throwing out months of unopened magazines and junk mail, long-expired food, plastic takeout containers and pizza boxes, desiccated flowers, ratty underwear and T-shirts. I hired a maid service to come and clean. I went shopping and bought some clothes that didn’t hang on me. I took Izzy to the groomers, got a haircut, had the car washed and the oil changed.

The morning of the viewing, I shaved and dressed with more care than I had in two years. It was about forty-five minutes to Passaic—double that in traffic, but this was the middle of a Saturday—and as I crossed into Jersey I felt a queasy mixture of excitement and dread. I had absolutely no idea what I would say to these people once we were face to face. I only knew that I had to go and meet them.

The funeral home was in a working-class neighborhood, and my BMW 650i convertible with its YUKYUK vanity plate was conspicuously out of place among the Kias, Hyundais and older-model American cars that filled the parking lot. I sat with the engine running for a long while, studying the black-clad people entering and exiting the building. Most went in pairs or groups, arms intertwined or locked around each other’s waists or shoulders. With few exceptions, the ones coming out looked less sad than the ones going in—which made no sense to me at all. Either Tuccelli & Sons was actually a massage parlor fronting as a mortuary, or some other mysterious force was at work.

Finally I screwed up the courage to get out of the car and go inside. The foyer was dimly lit and smelled overwhelmingly of flowers. I sneezed, and someone said, “God bless you.”

I turned and saw a kid in his late teens standing to one side of the doorway. He wore an ill-fitting black suit, a white carnation boutonniere and a lugubrious expression that looked incongruous on his pimply face. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said, giving me a solemn nod I would have bet a hundred bucks he’d practiced in the mirror. His voice was young and thready, trying desperately for gravitas. I figured him for one of the advertised Tuccelli sons, wearing one of his older brothers’ suits. No other kid his age would have taken that job.

“Are you here for the white viewing?” he asked.

I shook my head, confused. “No, he’s Hispanic.”

I’ll hand it to the kid, his face didn’t change an iota. “You must be here for Mr. Santiago, then,” he said, gesturing to the left. “He’s just down the hall, in the Chamber of Boundless Serenity. Mrs. White is upstairs, in the Bower of Everlasting Peace.”

In the old days that would have sparked enough material for a whole new act. Now I could only mumble embarrassed thanks and head in the direction he’d indicated.

Vaguely celestial organ music issued from the open doorway of the Chamber of Boundless Serenity. In a frame beside the door was a printed paper sign that read SANTIAGO. It was a little askew, and the tip of one corner showed above the frame. I straightened it, feeling a sudden fury at how flimsy it was, how easily replaceable.

The room was packed with people; that was all I registered before I was stopped by an extremely short, brown-skinned older man standing just inside the doorway. “Hello, señor?” he said, craning his neck to look up at me. “This is the Santiago viewing.”

“Then I’m in the right place,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

His face showed surprise, along with something else I couldn’t identify, but it sure didn’t look like welcome. I felt other eyes coming to rest on me, heard a wave of whispers travel across the room and then drop into silence. I looked over the man’s shoulder into a sea of black and brown. Black clothes and hair, brown skin and eyes, all trained on tall, blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced me. I might as well have been standing there in a horned helmet and chain mail waving a battle axe. I’d never felt whiter in all my life.

A guy about my age with a face like a clenched fist detached himself from a clump of people near the coffin and strode toward me. “Get out,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. You’re not welcome here.”

“Look,” I said, bewildered by his hostility, “I just came to pay my respects.”

He stepped closer, angling his head forward. His face was so close to mine I could smell his wintergreen breath mints. “You think by showing up here and proving how much you respect us, we’re gonna sue your gringo asses for any less, huh? Now get the fuck out.”

He was almost a foot shorter than me, but he was coiled and wiry and full of enough rage to quail even my strapping, pillaging ancestors. I held my hands up and started to back away.

“I’m not mugging you, asshole,” he said contemptuously. “Just turn around and walk out the door like a normal human being.”

“Wait.” A woman wove through the crowd and came over to us, placing a hand on my antagonist’s arm. She was in her late twenties, petite and slender, with large, almond-shaped eyes that were swollen from crying and a prominent nose I recognized from the photo of the deceased. I guessed this was the daughter, Elena. Her expression was appraising but not unfriendly.

“He’s not from the company, Esteban. Don’t you recognize him?”

Esteban squinted at me, and his scowl got deeper and, if possible, even more menacing. “You a TV reporter?”

“No, I, I’m a—” I fell silent, unable to think of a single word or phrase that would complete the sentence, and then it came to me: I was a nothing, a no one. And had been ever since the day Jess died.

“He’s an actor,” Elena said. “He was in that show Trainers, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember you,” Esteban said finally. “Funny guy who turned out not to be so funny. That why you came here today, huh? You looking for some laughs?”

I felt like I was falling—into whiteness, nothingness, into a vat of dough. What had I hoped to find here, among these total strangers? Kinship? Some sort of communion of the damned that would make me feel less alone?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“You got that right,” said Esteban.

I knew an exit cue when I heard one, but I couldn’t move, because Elena’s grave, considering gaze held me in place. Her brows were furrowed, like something was niggling at her. And then her expression changed, and her eyes widened and softened, and I saw Jess slide into place behind them.

“She died,” Elena said. “Your wife.”

“Yes,” I said. My own eyes were burning.

“I remember, I saw it on the news. It was horrible.”

“Yes.”

“How did she die?” asked Esteban.

I shook my head, unable to speak the words.

“Tell him,” Elena said.

“I can’t.”

“You can,” she said.

I started to say, You don’t understand, but of course she did. They all did.

As if she were reading my thoughts, Elena gestured at the watching crowd. “Tell them. How you lost your wife.”

I looked past her at the roomful of mourners, their faces now a swimming brown blur. “She was killed by a lightning strike because . . .” My voice cracked.

“Say it,” Elena said.

“Because she was wearing an underwire bra. It electrocuted her.”

There were some murmurs, and then Esteban’s hand came down on my shoulder. “Shit, man,” he said. “That really sucks.”

His eloquence undid me, and I started crying like I hadn’t cried since Jess’s funeral. Esteban raised his voice and translated (I didn’t speak Spanish, but I could make out the words esposa and electrocutada), and I heard more murmuring and felt a small, soft hand take hold of mine.

“Come, Michael,” Elena said, tugging me forward. “Come and meet my mother.”

As I moved through the room and felt the other hands touching my back and shoulders, I thought of the people I’d seen leaving the funeral home. Maybe, I thought, they’d looked better than the ones going in because they’d left a tiny bit of their sorrow here, behind them.

I DIDN’T STOP mourning Jess, but what had been a howling pain settled into something between a moan and a whimper, still constant but endurable. I kept the mortgage paid and Izzy in gourmet kibble with voiceover work: a couple of Nissan spots, a radio campaign for Coors Lite. Nothing funny; I told my agent not to call me in for those jobs. Michael Larssen was out of the funny business.

Elena and I had exchanged numbers and promises to stay in touch, which neither of us had kept. What did we have in common, really, besides bizarre misfortune? And attraction—there was that, but I couldn’t deal with that. We’d both felt it, and it had made our parting awkward. After we hugged she’d reached up and laid her hand against my cheek, and I’d felt a sudden urge to grab hold of it and press her palm to my mouth. I didn’t do that, of course, I just stammered hot-faced thanks and good-bye. Whenever I thought of Elena, and I tried not to, I felt squirmy. So when I got a voice mail from her some four months later, I was both pleased and rattled.

“Hey Michael, it’s Elena Santiago. Can you meet me for coffee this week? I have something I want to ask you.” Coffee, not drinks, and she sounded serious and not the least bit flirtatious. I ignored the twinge of disappointment I felt and called her back. Her manner was the same on the phone, and when I tried to probe her about the reason for her call, she said she’d rather speak to me about it in person.

We met at a coffee shop she suggested on 114th and Broadway. She was already seated when I got there, and I gave her a quick and only slightly clumsy peck on the cheek before sitting down across from her. She was as pretty as I remembered, and as sad.

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not great. I’ve had to take a leave of absence from school. I just can’t seem to focus.”

I nodded; I knew that feeling. “Where are you in school?”

“Here,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of the campus across the street. “I’m in the law school.”

“At Columbia?” It came out more incredulous than I’d intended.

“Sí, at Columbia,” she said acerbically, in an exaggerated Spanish accent. “For every floor I scrub, they let me take a class.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Her mouth twisted in a rueful grimace. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was rude. I’ve been rude a lot lately.”

“Have your friends stopped calling you yet?” Elena gave me a puzzled look, and I said, “Master my proven techniques, and in just thirty days you can alienate your friends, co-workers and your entire family too, or your money back.”

That earned me a half smile. “How are you doing, Michael?” she asked.

“Better, actually. I think it helped, meeting you and your family.”

Something flashed in her eyes. “That’s why I wanted to see you.” She rooted in her purse, pulled out a piece of paper and pushed it across the table. It was a printout of an Internet article called “The 10 Most Bizarre, Ludicrous Deaths of 2010.” They were listed in reverse order. The last paragraph was circled:

#1: DEATH BY FEMININE HYGIENE???!!!!

On September 27, chronic snorer Jim Harbuck stuffed tampons up his nostrils in an effort to quiet himself, not knowing that his condition was caused by sleep apnea, which closed up his throat and suffocated him. His wife, who might have saved him, was sleeping on the sofa downstairs, having been driven there by his thunderous snores.

As I read I could feel Elena’s solemn gaze on me. I met it reluctantly. I knew where this was headed.

“Her name is Roberta,” Elena said. “She lives in Durham, North Carolina.”

“And you want to go meet her.”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to come with you.”

She nodded. “Will you?”

Her dark eyes entreated me. I looked away from them. “I don’t know, Elena. I’m trying to move on, you know?”

“I am too,” she said, “but I’m stuck. I need to do this, Michael. And I can’t do it on my own.”

“What about your cousin?”

“Esteban thinks I’m loca. Maybe he’s right.” Her eyes were glistening suspiciously.

Well what would you have done in my place, sat there and let her cry? Anyway, I owed her one—a fact I reminded myself of as I pulled onto her block of West 111th Street less than forty-eight hours later, grumpy and late. I’d had to get up at six, which has never been my finest hour, and in my befuddled, undercaffeinated state I’d forgotten Izzy’s food and had to double back and get it. He was riding shotgun with his head hanging out the window and his tongue flapping ecstatically in the wind, trailing a glistening rope of drool. As I drove up the block, looking for Elena’s building, it occurred to me to wonder whether she liked dogs. I hadn’t told her Izzy would be coming with us, and I decided right then that if she minded, the trip was off, because I wasn’t going without him. I’d been doubting the wisdom of this little expedition from the moment I’d agreed to it, and damned if I was going to spend eighteen-plus hours in a car with a person who didn’t have the sense to like—no, forget like—to love, to fawn slavishly all over my sweet, eminently lovable dog. I vowed that if she even so much as brushed his hair off the passenger seat, I was going to tell her to forget it. Anyone who was put off by a little dog hair on her clothes—or, for that matter, slobber or pee dribbles on the bedspread or stepping barefoot into the occasional pool of vomit on the rug—was not someone I wanted in my life, not for two days, not for two minutes. You see where I was going with this. By the time I reached Elena’s building I’d pretty much convinced myself she was a dog-hating bitch who could find her own way to Durham. If she hadn’t been standing on the curb waiting for me, I might have driven right past her building and back to Brooklyn.

But there she was, looking lovely and a little anxious, and when she caught sight of Izzy she smiled, and when she saw that he was with me her smile got wider. I stopped the car, and she went to the window and let him whuffle her hand before bending down to say hello. “Nice to meet you too,” she said, when he licked her face. “And who would you be?”

“That’s Izzy,” I said.

I popped the trunk and went to get her luggage, which consisted of a backpack that weighed next to nothing. The sight of our two small bags sitting in the cavernous space of the otherwise-empty trunk put a hollow ache in my gut. Jess would have brought a couple of anvil-filled suitcases, a computer bag, a cooler crammed with food and a purse the size of a beer tub and considered it traveling light. What the hell was I doing, going on a road trip with this backpack-toting woman I hardly knew?

“Look, Elena—” I said, but before I could tell her I’d changed my mind, I saw her reach out with her thumb and wipe the gritters out of Izzy’s eyes, and then just as casually wipe her hand on her jeans.

She turned and looked at me, brows raised. “Yes?”

I sighed. “We should get going. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

IT WAS UNSETTLING at first, having a copilot after more than two years of flying solo. Elena was a smaller, quieter presence in the car than Jess had been, and her perfume was stronger and flowerier. I kept my eyes on the road, hyperaware of her beside me, but she seemed totally at ease, and after half an hour or so I started to unclench a little. She asked me about my family and I sketched the basics: second son of two Yuppie doctors, one an orthopedic surgeon and the other an English professor at NYU; Upper East Side, upper middle class, mediocre test scores and grades unbefitting a Larssen; cut-up and chronic underachiever until my early twenties, when I’d discovered comedy.

“So did you go to college?” Elena asked.

“Of course. I majored in beer and girls, but I managed to graduate.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Just the way you said that. So . . . offhandedly.”

Good job, Michael, I chided myself. Elena’s father had been a factory worker. College wouldn’t have been an “of course” for her, and she wouldn’t have diddled her way through it like I had. “I must sound like an entitled jerk,” I said.

“Not at all,” she replied, fairly convincingly. “That’s just how you grew up, in a world where college was no big deal.”

“Were you the first in your family to go?”

“Yes. I had a full scholarship to Wellesley.”

“Wow. Your parents must have been incredibly proud of you.”

Elena didn’t answer, and I glanced over at her. She was biting her lip, fighting tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like the world’s biggest ass. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”

She shook her head. “It’s all right. I want to talk about him. If you don’t mind listening.”

“Tell me,” I said.

And so she told me about her father, Julio Santiago, Santa to his friends. He’d grown up dirt poor in a small village in Puebla, where he’d met and married Elena’s mother. He’d emigrated illegally to the States in 1981, leaving his pregnant wife in Mexico, and worked whatever jobs he could get—busboy, farmhand, janitor—sending money home to support his wife and daughter. Elena hadn’t even met her father until she was six years old, when he became a citizen under the Reagan amnesty and was finally able to send for them.

“He sounds like an amazing guy,” I said.

“He was. He’d have given you the shirt off his back if you needed it. That’s one of the reasons everyone called him Santa, because he was so generous. That, and because he was always laughing. He was a small man, but he had this big, booming laugh. You couldn’t hear it and not laugh with him.”

I thought of Jess and was silent.

“I never understood that,” Elena went on. “His joy, I mean. He worked so hard for so long and had so little to show for it.”

“He had you.”

“Yeah, his malcontent of a daughter, who wanted things he couldn’t give me and a life that made no sense to him. How could I be happy without a husband, a family? He didn’t understand it, because he wouldn’t have been. My mother and I were the center of his universe.”

“So . . . do you not want to get married and have kids?”

“Sure I do, but I’m not even thirty. I’ve got plenty of time.”

“Yeah, I thought that too, once,” I said, around the balled-up sock lodged in my throat.

Elena touched my shoulder. “Hey—” she began, but I cut her off.

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay, then we won’t talk about it.”

She retrieved her hand and sat back, but if she was stung I couldn’t sense it. The silence between us was surprisingly comfortable, and after a while I realized I was no longer brooding about Jess but thinking about Elena and how easy it was to be with her and what it might be like to kiss her, which set me to brooding again. She left me to it. She was so quiet and still that I thought she must be asleep, but when I stole a glance at her she was staring pensively out the windshield.

“Penny,” I said.

“What if she refuses to talk to us? What if she’s offended we came?”

We’d debated and ultimately decided against calling Roberta Harbuck to let her know we were coming, figuring the risk of rejection would be less in person. We might be loco for doing this, but we didn’t look unhinged. We looked, it occurred to me, like a nice young couple.

Shying from the thought, I said, “Then we apologize profusely and get the hell out of there.”

Dusk was falling when we reached our destination, a two-story clapboard house in a middle-class neighborhood. It was a warm September evening, and people were out throwing balls with their kids, weeding their flower beds and sipping beers on their front porches. We walked and fed Izzy then put him back in the car with the windows partway down. He whined when I closed the door, and Elena reached inside and patted him on the head.

“Sorry, Izcito. We won’t be long.”

“He’s always like that,” I said. “He hates being left.”

She gave me a bemused look. “Who doesn’t?”

A Big Wheel missing its main attraction lay abandoned in the overgrown grass to one side of the walk. So, I thought, it wasn’t just Roberta Harbuck who’d lost her husband; a child or children were now fatherless. The house needed a fresh coat of paint, and one of the front steps was nearly rotted through. I felt a pang of sadness at these signs of masculine neglect.

The door was open, and the sound of a television gunfight wafted onto the porch, which was littered with toys and debris. A recycling bin sat by the doorway, overflowing with Dr Pepper cans. Buried among them were several empty half-gallon bottles of Jim Beam. The sight of them made me want to turn around and head back to the car. I had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to go well.

But Elena was already knocking on the screen door and, when there was no answer, calling, “Hello? Anybody home?”

A teenaged girl appeared. She was fourteen or so, skinny and barefoot, with long hair that needed washing. She wore cutoffs and a Lady Gaga T-shirt that was a size too small. She squinted at us warily through the screen.

“What do you want?” she said. Her accent made the “want” sound like “won’t.”

Elena smiled at her. “Is your mother here?”

“Who is it, Brie?” A little boy who couldn’t have been more than six or seven appeared in the door frame, sucking his thumb and trailing a ratty blanket. A vivid red smear ran across his chin. I hoped it was food and not blood.

“Nobody we know.” The girl licked her thumb then knelt and wiped the red off him. I was reminded of Elena cleaning Izzy’s eyes. “Go on now and finish your s’ghetti before it gets cold.” She gave him a gentle push in the direction of the gunfight.

“Sorry if we interrupted your supper,” Elena said.

The girl, Brie, stood and regarded us with magnificent disdain. “I’ve told you people before, we’re Baptists. We’re not interested in becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses, so you can just hightail it on back to your Kingdom Hall.”

I barely managed to turn my snort of laughter into a coughing fit. Were we that earnest-looking? Elena shot me a stern glance, and I got myself under control.

“That’s not why we’re here,” she said to the girl.

Brie’s eyes narrowed. “You selling something then? ’Cause whatever it is, we’re not buying.”

“No, nothing like that,” Elena said. “We just want to have a word with your mother.”

The kindness and compassion in her voice would have thawed a wooly mammoth, but Brie was unmoved. “What about?”

Elena hesitated, then said, “About something personal. Something important.”

The girl’s face slammed shut. “Is this to do with my daddy?”

Elena nodded.

“Mama’s sleeping,” Brie said, crossing her arms over her chest.

Elena and I exchanged a look: at seven o’clock in the evening?

“Brianna? Is someone there?” a woman called from upstairs.

“No, Mama, it’s just the TV,” the girl answered, shooting us a glare that said, Don’t you dare say a word.

“Well turn it down, honey, Mama’s got a headache.” Her voice was querulous and slurred. “And fetch me another glass of ice, will you?”

“Yes, Mama,” Brie answered, with a forced brightness that was at odds with the despair inhabiting her young-old eyes. I wondered which was worse for her: being at home and taking care of her drunk, abdicated mother, or being at school and trying to act indifferent to the heartless snickering of the other kids.

“I gotta go now.” Brie stepped back and started to close the door.

“Hey,” I said. “Both of us lost someone too.”

The girl went still.

“And the way we lost them was kind of like how you lost your father. Not literally the same, but just as . . .” I trailed off, struggling to put it into words.

“Just as random, and just as hard for us to accept and make sense of,” Elena said.

Brie considered us for a long moment before answering. “Then I’m sorry for you,” she said quietly. “And you’ll understand why I’m asking you to leave now. My mama doesn’t need reminding. None of us do.” She gave us a little dip of her head and shut the door in our faces.

But when we were halfway down the walk, we heard the door open and Brie call out in a loud whisper, “Hey, wait!” She ran over to us. “There was another lady came here about a month ago, wanting to talk to Mama about how she’d lost her brother. She left this. You can have it.” Brie thrust a business card into my hand.

It read: CATHERINE FISHER, PH.D., PSYCHOLOGIST, and gave an address in Austin, Texas.

“And did she speak with your mother?” Elena asked.

“No. Mama wasn’t home, and I never told her.”

“Did the lady say how her brother died?” I asked.

Brie nodded. “He was butted to death by his pet goat.”

“HAVE YOU EVER noticed how congealed egg yolk looks like ichor from some hideous, scabrous alien?” I said.

It was two o’clock the next afternoon, and Elena and I were at a diner down the street from our hotel. My efforts to medicate my hangover with coffee and fried food were being hampered by our waitress, who’d been fawning over a biker type a few booths over for the last half hour, refilling his coffee, bringing him ice water and extra napkins, giving him an eyeful of cleavage when she bent over to clear his plate. He wasn’t sitting there staring at the repulsive remains of his lunch.

“Eye core?” Elena said, sounding it out. “What’s that?”

“It’s what scabrous aliens have instead of blood,” I said. “It’s like mucus, only slimier and yellower.”

“And what’s scabrous?”

“What it sounds like: covered in oozing scabs.” Elena made a face and set down the piece of toast that had been halfway to her mouth. “And if our waitress doesn’t come take this plate away soon,” I said, raising my voice and boring holes in the girl’s back with my bloodshot eyes, “I’m going to pretend it’s a frisbee and throw it at her.”

“Are you always this impatient?” Elena asked.

“Only when I’m this hung over.” I pushed the plate farther away, feeling my stomach roil at the sight of all that yellow goo. The waitress giggled at one of Harley dude’s witticisms and flashed her tongue stud at him. “Excuse me, miss?” I called. “Could we get some service, please?”

“Men are such babies.” Elena picked up my plate, marched it over to the counter, then slid back into her seat across from me.

“You will be too when you’re dying,” I said plaintively. “And how come you’re not, anyway?”

Elena hardly seemed to feel the effects of our carouse the night before. We’d driven from the Harbucks’ to the first hotel we’d seen, confirmed they allowed dogs and had a bar, checked in, deposited Izzy and our stuff in our rooms and proceeded to plunge together into the river Cuervo—lady’s choice. It was the only sensible response to what we’d just seen and heard. After the fourth shot, Brie’s face and the whiskey-clotted voice of her mother started to recede to a comfortable distance, and after the sixth I stopped counting. When the bartender cut us off we staggered back to our respective rooms. I had a vague memory of standing in the hallway trying to kiss Elena’s mouth and managing instead to plant one on her naked eyeball, at which point she’d keyed open my door and pushed me inside.

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to do tequila shots with a Mexican?” she said now.

“Obviously not.”

She sipped her coffee, considering me over the rim of the cup. “Do you still have the card Brie gave us?”

“I think so.” Reluctantly, I took it from my wallet and passed it to her. We hadn’t talked about next steps, but I for one had every intention of returning to New York. No way was I driving halfway across the country on another fool’s errand.

There was a sizzle from the grill, followed by a waft of something so noxious I felt my breakfast surge up into the back of my throat. “Jesus,” I said, forcing it back down, “what is that smell?”

Elena sniffed the air appreciatively. “Mmm, liver and onions. It’s one of my mom’s specialties.”

“Smells like week-old roadkill with a side of unwashed jockstrap to me,” I replied, and took a breath—two fatal errors. My stomach rebelled, pushed over the edge by the combination of the smell and my own vivid imagery. I lurched to my feet and sprinted for the bathroom.

When I returned ten minutes later, minus my lunch but feeling marginally better, Elena was on her cell phone, nodding and scribbling something on the back of the card.

“Who are you talking to?” I asked, sliding into the booth.

Shh, she mouthed, putting her forefinger to her lips.

“Elena, please tell me you’re not on the phone with that woman.” She frowned at me and pressed her palm over her other ear.

“Sí, sí,” she said, followed by an excited burble of Spanish. It should have reassured me; she could have been talking to her mother. But it didn’t, because I knew she wasn’t. “Muchas gracias. Hasta mañana, Catarina.” That much I understood: “See you tomorrow, Catherine.”

“I’m not driving to Texas to meet some crazy grief stalker,” I said, the instant she hung up.

“She’s not crazy.”

“Of course she is, she’s a shrink. They’re all mental. That’s why they study psychology in the first place, to understand their own neuroses.”

“Well if she’s mental, then so are we.”

There wasn’t a damn thing I could say to that. It struck me then, that I had been on the verge of certifiable ever since Jess died. And that I was ready to be sane again.

“Anyway, we won’t have to go to Texas,” Elena said. “Catherine’s flying to Charleston tomorrow. She found another one of us, a man who lost his partner, and they’re going to meet.”

“I’m not going to South Carolina, either.”

“She sounds really kind, Michael, and wise and . . . I don’t know, just . . . lovely. I mean, how incredible is it that we’d happen to call her the day before she was going to meet this man, and that he’d end up living just five hours away from where we are right now?” And that she’d just happen to be kind and wise and lovely and speak fucking fluent Spanish. “It’s like it was meant to be,” Elena said.

“Or not.”

Ignoring me, Elena turned and raised her forefinger in the air. The waitress materialized instantly at our table.

“What can I git y’all?”

“The check please, and two coffees for the road,” Elena said, and then looked at me.

“Woo, woo! The express train to New York will be departing in ten minutes. Any passengers who wish to go elsewhere will need to make other arrangements.”

Yup, that’s what I meant to say, and that’s probably what you think you would have said if you’d been sitting in that booth instead of me. And then when Elena informed you she was going to Charleston with or without you, you think you would have told her she was on her own and left her there and gotten in your car and pointed it north, but you and I both know that’s a load of crap. No, you’d have done exactly what I did: heave a resigned sigh, turn to the waitress and say, “Milk and sugar for me, please. And a side of bacon for my dog.”

“WHERE ARE WE?” I asked Elena groggily.

“About seventy miles from Charleston. You’ve been asleep for a couple of hours.”

From the shooting pain on the right side of my neck I hadn’t budged the entire time. And my mouth was dry—a bad sign. “Did I snore?”

“No comment.”

Wonderful. “Did I drool?”

“Not that I noticed,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road.

I looked down and saw a damp spot the size of a tennis ball on the right side of my shirt, just below my shoulder. “Well,” I muttered, “thanks for letting me sleep.”

A contented groan sounded from the backseat, and I belatedly remembered Izzy. He was curled up in a ball, fast asleep. “He’s been out the whole time,” Elena said.

“What about you?” I asked. “You tired? Want me to drive?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

I realized I’d been hoping she’d say that, and then I realized why: this way I could look at her. “Uh, what time are we meeting Catherine tomorrow?”

“We’re picking her up at the airport at ten and then going to George’s house. That’s his name, George Drayton.”

“Did she tell you his story?”

“Yes. His partner was killed last July third. Ran his car off the road, straight into a fireworks stand. Fortunately they saw him coming, and no one else was hurt in the explosion.”

“So what does that have to do with us? I mean, what’s the . . .” I faltered.

“The punch line? When they pulled his body out they found bubble gum all over the lenses of his sunglasses.”

I pictured it: the guy blowing a big bubble, being blinded, losing control of his car, kaboom. “So if it hadn’t been July third, and it hadn’t been a sunny day . . .”

“Yeah.” Elena shook her head. “He was just half a mile from home.”

“Poor guy,” I said, thinking not of him but of his partner, standing in the kitchen chopping carrots and hearing that awful blast of sound and thinking, What the hell? And then maybe knowing in his bones, like I had, that it had something to do with him; that it had blown up his hopes and changed his life forever.

Elena let me sit with it for a while, and then she said, “You want to tell me about her?”

And suddenly Jess was there in the car with us, and there was room for her because Elena made room—by wanting to listen and understand, by already partway understanding before I even started to talk. And so I gave her Jess: her laughter, her restless curiosity, the combination of strength and vulnerability, passion and compassion, that made even the most reticent people want to tell her their stories and trust her to write about them. Her crazy Mormon upbringing, her three macho brothers who never liked me and her devout widowed mother who, to everyone’s surprise except Jess’s, did. The look on her face when I asked her to marry me, when she saw Iz in his cage at the ASPCA, when she landed her first New Yorker piece, when they called my name at the Emmys. Of course I didn’t share everything—there are parts of Jess that are nobody’s but mine—but I gave Elena a lot of the really good stuff and finally, when she nudged me—“And in addition to being an angel, was she also a saint?”—some of the bad.

Jess could be impatient and moody. She tended to fret over little things: an unreturned phone call, an overcooked roast. She’d voted for Bush twice (though not, in her defense, for McCain). And the worst thing, the thing I’d never told anyone, was that buried beneath that magnificent humor of hers was a ferocious, scorched-earth temper that emerged every six months or so and turned her into an alarming stranger. The last time being the day she died.

Oh, did I forget to mention that?

It wasn’t me she was mad at that day; at least, not initially. She’d been working for months on a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly about political wives, and they’d decided to cut it in half. Jess was in high dudgeon: the editors were cowards, Philistines, sexist porkers. I made the mistake of pointing out that the managing editor, who’d presumably been part of the decision to cut the piece, was a woman, and that’s when Jesszilla came roaring out. Usually I just let her rant until she’d spent her fury, but that day I was fed up with the drama, and when she tore into me I tore back. We said terrible things to each other, things the sight of her on that sidewalk twenty minutes later wiped almost completely from my memory—a small mercy. Jess was always the one who stormed out at some point in the argument, and that day was no different. Except that day she took Izzy with her. And died.

FADE IN:

INT. KITCHEN - DAY

MICHAEL LARSSEN, 34, is standing in a well-appointed open kitchen, furiously chopping carrots, WHACK WHACK WHACK. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt that says “I’m with stupid” over an arrow pointing down. Every few seconds he looks up and glares at the front door, like he might cheerfully decapitate the next person who walks in. He’s so distracted he cuts his finger with the knife.

MICHAEL

Son of a BITCH!

The rest of the scene went pretty much the same as previously scripted, except when I described it to Elena I found myself dredging up details I didn’t even know I remembered: How the jacket covering Jess had had a Knicks logo on it, which she would have hated, diehard Lakers fan that she was. How one of her shoelaces was loose, and how I’d had the irrational urge to bend down and tie it. How, when the paramedics were loading her body into the ambulance that would not be racing to the hospital with sirens wailing and red and blue lights flashing, the sky cleared suddenly and the sun broke through, and I looked up at it and shouted, “Fuck you!”

When I finished, Elena was quiet for a long while. From the wistful look on her face I guessed she was thinking about her father: the last time she’d seen him, the things she’d said to him and hadn’t, wished she’d said and wished she hadn’t. My hand reached out and squeezed hers.

INT. HOTEL LOBBY - NIGHT

Michael and ELENA, 29, are standing at guest reception in an elegant hotel, with IZZY, a springer spaniel, sitting at Michael’s side on a leash. Behind the desk is a stylish FEMALE CLERK, 25. This is the South: she greets them with a genuinely welcoming smile.

CLERK

Good evening. How may I help you?

MICHAEL

(tired, babbling a little)

Hi, do you have any rooms available? We don’t have a reservation. And as you see, we have a dog. A really quiet, well-behaved dog. Well, probably everyone says that about their dog, but Izzy actually is.

CLERK

I believe you, sir. And dogs are welcome here. How many rooms will you be needing?

Michael hesitates and looks at Elena, and the clerk gets very interested in her computer screen. The two of them come to a silent agreement.

MICHAEL

Just one room. A king, if you have it.

CLERK

Of course, sir.

INT. HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT

Michael and Elena come in, drop their bags and move into each other’s arms without a word. They don’t kiss, they just hold each other tightly.

INT. HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT

Michael and Elena lie entwined in the bed on top of the covers, still fully clothed, sleeping peacefully. Izzy is on Michael’s other side, sandwiching him.

WE OVERSLEPT AND ended up having to scramble to get to the airport in time to meet Catherine’s flight. As we left the hotel room I looked back at the bed, thinking about what would almost certainly have happened there if we hadn’t been so wiped last night and in such a hurry this morning. I couldn’t feel too resentful toward the good doctor, though. If it hadn’t been for Catherine, Elena and I wouldn’t have ended up in that bed in the first place, and I wouldn’t have woken up feeling something like happy for the first time in two years.

Elena was quiet and pensive in the car on the way to the airport. I kept casting sidelong glances at her, trying to gauge her mood, hoping she felt as good as I did, but her face gave nothing away. Ten minutes from the airport her phone chimed: a text from Catherine saying she’d landed and would meet us outside. As we pulled into the arrivals area I surveyed the people waiting to be picked up, looking for a wise, matronly type. The only woman I saw standing alone was a tall, striking brunette who bore more than a passing resemblance to Angelina Jolie. Who I’d had a thing for ever since I was sixteen and saw her in Cyborg 2. I must have masturbated five hundred times to that video.

“There she is,” Elena said excitedly.

“How do you know?” Angelina was now waving at us.

“I told her what kind of car you had. Besides, she looks just like I pictured her.”

“Huh.”

I pulled over and Elena hopped out, and before I could even put the car in park she and Catherine were hugging like they’d known each other for years and chattering away in Spanish. I went to join them, feeling a bit like an interloper.

“And this must be Michael.” Catherine turned to me, appraising me with large green eyes that I felt sure missed next to nada, a theory she confirmed by holding out her hand instead of hugging me like she had Elena. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. And then, “I’m very sorry about your wife.”

“Uh . . . you’re welcome. Me too. I mean I’m sorry too, about your brother.” I pumped her hand robotically, walloped by her beauty, which was exactly how I’d felt the one time I’d met Angelina Jolie, at a party at some muckety-muck producer’s house in Malibu. Catherine was older. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes said she was on the wrong side of forty-five, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at the rest of her. She was slim and fit, with lips like eiderdown pillows, long, tousled-looking brown-black hair and an hourglass figure revealed—in case anyone might miss it—by a low-cut blouse and a pair of skin-tight jeans tucked into high-heeled boots. She looked less like a therapist than a former Playboy centerfold. A supremely confident, ferociously intelligent former Playboy centerfold played by Angelina Jolie.

She gave me a compassionate smile, like she was used to reducing men to monosyllable-stammering idiots. “I just hung up with George,” she said. “His house is about twenty-five minutes from here, on the outskirts of Charleston. He gave me directions.”

“Well then, let’s get this show on the road!” I boomed unnaturally, sounding like a game show host telling a contestant they’d just won a BRAND NEW CAR! Elena was looking at me with one eyebrow lifted. I grabbed Catherine’s roller bag and beat a hasty retreat to the trunk.

To my relief, Catherine not only declined Elena’s invitation to sit up front, but she also kept the conversation light, steering clear of the three-hundred-pound dead gorilla in the car with us. She fussed over Izzy for a gratifyingly long amount of time, and then we chatted about Austin, where Elena had family and I’d done some comedy gigs, and New York, where Catherine once had a teaching fellowship at NYU.

“My mom’s a professor there,” I said. “Denise Larssen. Did you know her?”

“No, but I was only there for a semester. What department’s she in?”

“English. She teaches American lit. How about you, what did you teach?”

“Human sexuality.”

I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were full of mischief. “Bet that was a popular course,” I said. We all laughed, and I felt myself begin to relax. A feeling that lasted all of ten minutes, until we got to Summerville and pulled up in front of George’s house.

Elena whistled, and I said, “Mint julep, anyone?”

George’s “house” was a mansion straight out of some antebellum wonderland: a surreal pink and white confection of a plantation house surrounded by more roses than I’d ever seen in one place outside of Pasadena. He could have single-handedly decorated an armada of parade floats.

“A hundred and eighty degrees from the Harbucks’,” Catherine said quietly.

Which slammed all three of us head-on into grim reality and our reason for being there. The exuberant flowers and cheery pink paint suddenly seemed heartbreaking, more so even than the shabbiness and neglect we’d found in Durham. I thought of myself, cursing the sun the day Jess died. How could George stand to be surrounded by so much meaningless fucking beauty?

I started to tear up—just what a guy wants to do in front of two attractive women, one of whom he hopes to make mad passionate love to later that night. I turned my head toward the driver’s side window to hide my face and felt Catherine’s hand come down on my shoulder, and with it, the phantom warmth of all the hands that had touched me there in the last two years: the unyielding grip of the guy who’d pulled me back from Jess’s charred body. My father’s hand and my brother’s, saying with a squeeze all the things they didn’t have words for at the funeral. The hands of worried friends, colleagues, strangers. Esteban’s hand and his relatives’. Elena’s, a mere forty-eight hours ago.

“Don’t,” I said, shrugging it off. I wanted to shrug them all off. I was sick to death of feeling that weight; of being that guy, the guy who induced people’s sympathy instead of their laughter.

“It’s okay,” Catherine said. “You don’t have to come in with us if you don’t want to.”

“Oh, yes he does,” Elena said. Her voice was fierce. “Look at me, Michael.”

I shook my head and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

“Look at me.”

I looked. Her face was adamant and impossibly lovely. “You can,” she said, just like she had at the funeral home. Only this time what the words triggered wasn’t grief, but rage. Not at Elena, but at the whole effed-up situation. And for the first time ever, at Jess. If she hadn’t had a temper tantrum and stormed out like a petulant teenager, I wouldn’t be sitting here blubbering in front of a stranger’s house in suburban Charleston. I wouldn’t have wrecked my career and driven away every person who cared about me, wouldn’t have spent two years lost in a gray hell.

Fuck you, Jess, I thought. And felt something black and toxic slide out of me that I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying, even as the truth rose up and burst open in my head: I hadn’t just been cursing the sun that day. I’d been cursing her, my wife who was lying dead at my feet, and I’d been so ashamed of myself afterward that I’d taken all that rage and stuffed it back into whatever dark hole it had come from. And there it had stayed, festering, ever since.

I was aware of Elena watching me patiently, giving me the time to work through whatever I was feeling. Jess had been lousy at waiting. She was always racing ahead of me emotionally, drumming her fingers while I made my halting, plodding way toward her. And in that sense, nothing had changed. Once again I was the laggard and she was the frontrunner, waiting for me to catch up. But this time she’d gone far, far beyond me, and the wait would be long.

At least, I hoped it would be long.

I told her I was sorry then. Sorry for my anger and for the things I’d said that day, sorry I hadn’t stopped her from walking out that door. And most of all, sorry I wanted to live without her—because there was no denying that I did. I sent the apology off into the ether and felt an answering whoosh of certainty that if Jess were here, she’d apologize too and forgive me for all of it, just like I would forgive her. Had already forgiven her. About damn time, Larssen, I heard her ghost say. Took you long enough.

I looked at Elena and Catherine, and then past them, at George’s house. I’d had over two years to mourn Jess and come to terms with her death, but they’d only had a few months: three in Elena’s case, five in Catherine’s. I didn’t know what was waiting inside those pink walls, but I would go with them and find out, in the hope that they’d be able to leave a tiny part of their sorrow here, behind them.

I HALF EXPECTED the door to be opened by a butler in coattails and white gloves, but George welcomed us himself, the ladies with kisses on the cheek, me with a handshake and a wan smile, and Izzy (who’d been preapproved on the way there) with a pat on the head and a dog treat. “I have two dogs of my own,” he told me, sounding a lot like Ashley Wilkes. “I’d introduce them to Izzy, but they’re territorial beasts, and I’m afraid they’d try to have him for breakfast.”

George was tall and slender, fiftyish, with a long, Stan Laurel face, thinning ginger hair and mournful hazel eyes. Like the house and grounds, he looked ready for a garden party. He wore off-white linen pants, pristine white bucks and a salmon-colored pullover. No silk cravat, but I bet he had a drawer full of them in every color.

After the introductions he led us down a hallway and into a huge formal living room full of seriously valuable- and fragile-looking antiques and Oriental rugs. No doubt Scarlett O’Hara or an Architectural Digest photographer would have felt right at home, but I was afraid to touch anything. The room was dominated by a life-size oil painting of George and a much younger and better-looking man who must have been his partner. The two of them were holding identical pugs. I smiled; from George’s description I’d been picturing a pair of ferocious Dobermans.

George waved to a nice spread of pastries and fruit laid out on a sideboard and told us to help ourselves. No mint juleps, but there was a pitcher of Bloody Marys as well as coffee and tea. We all went for the Bloodies, meanwhile Izzy lapped at some water George had left for him in a gold-rimmed china bowl on an ornate silver tray. “Don’t get used to it, buddy,” I told him.

We sat down, me next to Elena on one of the half-dozen sofas in the room and Catherine and George in chairs across from us. An awkward silence fell, and we all looked at Catherine: she’d called this convention. I was prepared for some kind of psychobabbly speech about grief and healing, but she surprised me once again.

“My brother’s name was Caleb,” she said, without preamble. “Caleb Breedlove. He was actually my half brother. Our mother left his father and married mine when Cal was two, and I was born a year later. We grew up together in Austin, but he never really liked the city. My dad was a petroleum engineer who worked for the university; Cal’s was a hill-country farmer, and that was the life he wanted. As soon as he graduated from high school he moved back to Kerrville to help his father on the farm. I was inconsolable when he left. In spite of our differences, we adored each other. I’ll never forget the time in grade school when some jerk in his class told me I wasn’t his real sister because we had different daddies. Cal found me crying and broke the kid’s nose. He got paddled for it twice, first by the principal and then, when he refused to apologize, by my father, but Cal didn’t care. I couldn’t have wished for a better big brother. We grew apart over the years, but we made a point of talking on the first of every month, and he always sent me yellow roses on my birthday. That’s how I knew something was wrong last April, because the florist didn’t come.”

Catherine swallowed hard, and I thought she was going to keep going and tell us how Cal had died. Instead she stopped and turned to me. Expectantly.

I gave her a look: Why me? Her glance flickered to Elena and George, and I saw that they were both looking at their hands, struggling. They weren’t ready yet, but somehow, because of everything that had happened in the last seventy-two hours, I was.

“My wife had the most beautiful laugh you’ve ever heard,” I began, and told them our story: how we’d met, all the things I’d loved about her. It came much easier than when I’d told Elena; I wasn’t even fighting tears. I stopped before the storm, following Catherine’s lead. When I fell silent she gave me an approving nod, and I felt myself glowing like a fourth-grader who’d just gotten a gold star on his long division test.

Elena glanced at George, but he was silent, so she took a deep breath and gave us Julio Santiago, Santa to his friends. Her voice thickened in a couple of places, but she managed to get through it. And when she finished and received her valedictory nod from Catherine, I saw her sit up a little straighter.

“And then they died, all these wonderful people,” George said, startling us all. “One, two, three, and Shane makes four.” The bitterness and raw pain in his voice made me wince in sympathy.

Addressing Elena and me, he said, “Did Catherine tell you how my beloved met his maker?” We nodded, both of us using the smallest possible motions of our heads. “It was my fault, in a way. When we first got together Shane was smoking a pack and a half a day. I’d watched my mother die of lung cancer, and I was always after him to quit. It took me two years of pestering and pleading, but he finally kicked it, and that’s when he started with the chewing gum. And it couldn’t just be any old gum, oh no, it had to be grape-flavored bubble gum—can you imagine? Like an eight-year-old kid. There was always a fat purple wad of it in his mouth. I came to hate it almost as much as the smoking. One day I lost my temper and told him it made him look like the trailer trash he was. He just laughed and said, ‘Well, you can’t blame a cracker for trying to do his forefathers proud.’

George smiled sadly. “Shane didn’t take anything seriously, least of all himself. It was one of the main reasons I fell for him. Well, besides the obvious.” He gestured over his shoulder, in the direction of the portrait over the mantel. “I know what people thought when they saw us together: What could a hot young thing like him possibly want with an aging queer like me, besides money? And what could I possibly want with him, besides a hot young piece of tail? They might even have been right at the beginning, but they were wrong in the end. Shane was the love of my life, and I honestly believe I was the love of his.” George turned then, slowly, like he was being pulled against his will, and gazed up at the portrait with such naked longing I had to look away. “Goddamn gum,” he said.

“Well at least it wasn’t a goddamn goat,” Catherine responded, just as heatedly. “Remember the story about how Cal refused to apologize? Well, he was the stubbornest person I ever knew. Once he’d made up his mind about something, Jesus on a white horse couldn’t have persuaded him to change it. Which might have been fine if there’d been a brain inside that hard head of his, but the fact is Cal couldn’t have poured piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. Don’t get me wrong, he was as sweet and loyal as they come, and I loved him to pieces. But God he was stupid.”

Three jaws dropped, but Catherine didn’t seem to notice. “Cal believed anything he heard or read, and whatever version got to him first was the gospel truth. Obama’s a Muslim, they said so on Fox News. Aluminum foil causes Alzheimer’s. Stonehenge is an alien homing beacon. Fluoride is a form of mind control the government puts in our drinking water, and watch out because once enough of it builds up in your system you’ll do anything they say.”

She let out a choked laugh, and her eyes filled with tears. “He’d been living alone on the farm for six months, ever since his wife Tiffany ran off with the satellite dish repair guy. She withdrew every cent of their savings from the bank on her way out of town, but she left her pet goat behind. Billy—original, huh? Cal never liked that thing. She’d treated it way better than she had him, and I figured he’d turn it into cabrito. Instead, my brother got one of his genius ideas. Called me up on the first of April all excited and told me he was in the process of creating a whole new breed of working animal—the Guard Goat—and that Billy was the prototype. A natural, Cal claimed, just like Tony Romo or Robert Redford in that movie. Once he’d had gotten Billy fully trained, Cal planned to patent his techniques and give ‘seminarials’ all over the country. If it had been anybody but my brother telling me this, I would have been waiting for the ‘April Fools!’ But I knew damn well he was serious. When I asked him what training a Guard Goat entailed, he got all mysterious on me, like I might reveal his secret methods to the breathlessly waiting world of potential Guard Goat breeders. I thought it was hilarious, typical Cal. I wished him luck, told him I loved him and hung up the phone. Three weeks later he was dead. When I went to the house I found all these library books on training techniques for military attack dogs. Basically he’d been teaching this goat to be Rambo—in German. All the commands were in German, and he’d circled some of them and put little notes to himself in the margins, like ‘Say it like you mean it!’ and ‘Remember YOU are the top goat!’”

Catherine was crying hard now, struggling to get the words out. “He was right, that goat was a prodigy. Either that or it had just had enough of Cal’s bad Hitler impersonations, because one day it turned on him and killed him. Butted him thirty-seven times. You know how I know that? Because he captured the whole thing on film.” She started rocking herself, sobbing, but as she went on the sounds changed, and the sobs turned to hysterical laughter. “There’s Commandant Cal in his desert fatigue pants and combat boots, standing in the goat pen with this big male with these big honking horns. Cal’s giving it hand signals,” Catherine made karate-chop motions with her hands, “and barking orders at it in atrociously accented German: ‘Achtung!’ ‘Setz!’ And at first the goat’s actually obeying. It’s paying attention, it’s sitting, it’s staying and going down on command, and you can see Cal swelling up with pride, thinking about all the money he’s going to make off his seminarials and imagining the look on Tiffany’s face when she realizes the gold mine she foolishly walked away from. Then Cal points to a stuffed dummy a few feet away and says, ‘Fass!’ which means ‘Attack!’ and the goat’s like Sieg heil! but instead of charging the dummy it charges Cal and butts him in the thigh, wham! And Cal goes down, flat on his back. For a minute he’s just lying there in a daze, and then he sits up and rubs his leg and looks at the goat with this wounded expression on his face. ‘What the heck, Billy?’ he says. ‘That hurt.’ And the goat paws the ground and charges him and butts him in the shoulder, wham! ‘Hey!’ Cal yells. He’s hopping mad now, his face is bright red and he’s practically got steam coming out of his ears. ‘Oh, you’ve done it now, mister,’ he tells the goat as he struggles to his feet. ‘You’ve crossed the line now.’

Catherine stopped, gasping for air, laughing so hard she could barely speak. “Cal draws himself up and puffs his chest out, by God he’s going to show that goat who’s boss, and he’s shouting ‘Setz!’ and ‘Platz!’ and making his patent-pending Guard Goat hand signals. But the goat doesn’t want to sit or go down, what it wants to do is fass. This time Cal dodges it, yelling, ‘Nein, Billy! Nein!’ but the goat’s not having it, oh no, it’s trained too long and hard for this moment, and it butts him again, wham! And Cal goes back down. He tries to get up but he can’t, his legs won’t support him, and he’s sitting there hollering every German word he can think of. Meanwhile the goat’s in full battle mode, and it butts him again, wham! So Cal points his finger at it and in his sternest voice, pulls out his last-ditch ace in the hole: ‘Bad goat! Baaaad goat!’ Wham! Wham!”

It was horrible; it was funny as shit. Catherine was doubled over, and tears and snot were streaming down her face. I couldn’t help it, I started laughing too, and then Elena joined in and then George, and before long we were all howling and clutching our bellies. “Bad goat! Wham!” Catherine cried, and I shouted, “Volkswagen! Wham!” At which point it turned into a free-for-all: “Dachsund! Wham!” “Frankfurter! Wham!” “Lederhosen! Wham!”

Eventually we subsided, the howls turning into sheepish chortles that would soon fade into shamed silence; we could all sense it coming. Catherine looked like she was about to start crying again.

“I read about these two guys in Ireland,” Elena said. “They were driving on a country road, going in opposite directions, and the fog was so incredibly thick and the insides of their windshields were so covered with condensation they couldn’t see a thing, so both of them had their heads stuck out the window.” She demonstrated, wrapping her hands around an imaginary steering wheel, craning her neck to one side and squinting. “And then—” She smacked her hands together, front to back.

“No,” I said, already laughing.

“They decapitated each other!”

Hilarity: shrieking, roaring, belly clutching.

“Okay, I’ve got another one,” George said. “There was this zookeeper in Germany tending a constipated elephant. He’d dosed it with laxatives and fed it a whole bunch of prunes, but nothing was working. He was trying to give it an enema when it finally let loose. The eruption knocked the zookeeper over. He struck his head, passed out and drowned in a sea of elephant shit.”

More uproar. My sides felt like someone was taking a machete to them. I couldn’t remember ever laughing so hard in all my life. “Did you see the one about the stripper?” I gasped. Three head shakes. “She was working a bachelor party, and they put her inside one of those big fake cardboard cakes. The toasting went on for a long while, and then the best man finally cued the music.” I sang it: “Da dum bum bum, da dum bum bum. But she didn’t appear. Thinking she might have fallen asleep, he knocked on the side of the cake, but still no stripper.”

“She’d suffocated in there, right?” said Elena in a small voice.

It was horrible; it wasn’t the least bit funny. Suddenly no one was laughing anymore, and we were all looking anywhere but at each other. Catherine hiccuped and started crying again. “I’m a terrible human being,” she said. “We’re all terrible.”

“No you’re not,” I said. “You needed that. We all did.” Silence from the others. “Didn’t we?” I asked, elbowing Elena.

“Yes, we did,” she said, and I could tell she meant it. George seconded her, then produced a handkerchief and passed it to Catherine. She wiped her face, blew her nose and crumpled the cloth in her fist.

“It’s just so ridiculous,” she said. “I mean, for crying out loud. Butted to death? Hic! Kneaded to death? Immolated because you blew a bubble? Electrocuted by your bra?”

We sat there quietly for a moment, collecting ourselves, and then Catherine asked where the restroom was. George escorted her out, and Elena went with them. Izzy came over and jumped up without invitation onto George’s immaculate white upholstery, and I let him settle his head in my lap. The pugs might be apoplectic when they smelled him later, but I didn’t think our host would mind.

The three of them returned, George carrying a pitcher of fresh Bloodies. He filled all our glasses, then lifted his own.

“To Cal,” George said.

“And Santa,” Catherine said, lifting hers.

“And Jess,” Elena said.

“And Shane,” I said, full circle.

We drank and made awkward, sporadic small talk, like the kind you make with a stranger you had sex with the night before who ended up spending the night instead of leaving afterward like they were supposed to. I finished my drink in record time and looked inquiringly at Elena. She nodded and we stood.

“We’re going to get going,” I said. “Catherine, can we give you a lift to the airport?”

“My flight’s not till tomorrow,” she replied, “but you can drop me at my hotel. I made a reservation at a B and B on the Battery.”

“It’s pronounced ‘BAT-tree’, my dear,” said George, “and it’s an overpriced tourist trap. I wouldn’t dream of letting you stay there, or anywhere but here with me.” When she protested, he added, “Please, I’d be glad of the company.”

That settled, they walked us outside and we said our good-byes, promising to stay in touch. This time, somehow, the words didn’t feel empty. Maybe because this time, neither did I.

“CHUNKY MONKEY OR Cherry Garcia?” I ask.

“Chunky Monkey,” Elena says. “Captain Picard or Captain Kirk?”

“Kirk.”

“Ennhhh. Wrong answer. Opera or ballet?”

“Baseball,” I say. “Mets or Yankees?

“Yankees. Thai or Indian?”

“Mexican,” I say.

“Ding ding ding!”

We’re about halfway to New York, and Elena’s driving. I’m just a passenger, zipping along toward God knows what fate—but then, so are you. You may think you know what’s going to happen in my story or your own, but the truth is you don’t have a clue. You’re right here with me, off the map. Here, for all you know, there be dragons.

“Paris or Rome?” I ask.

“Haven’t been to either.”

“So which one would you like to see first?”

Elena shoots me a look. I don’t know her well enough yet to read it, though I know her a whole lot better after last night. Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m skipping the love scene, or should I say scenes. Suffice it to say the first one was a tearjerker, and the three that followed would have had to be severely edited to make NC-17.

“What did you say to George on the porch?” she asks, surprising me. I didn’t think she’d been paying attention to us.

“That would be the veraaandah. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“You first.”

I shrug, smile. “I just wished him luck, is all.”

Elena isn’t fooled, but she lets it go for now. “Rome,” she says.

EXT. GEORGE’S VERANDAH - DAY

Elena and CATHERINE, 45, are hugging and saying tearful good-byes in Spanish. Michael and GEORGE, 50ish, are standing off to one side.

GEORGE

Thank you for coming, Michael.

MICHAEL

You can’t imagine how much I didn’t want to, but I’m glad I did.

They shake hands. Michael considers George, wrestling with something, and comes to a decision.

MICHAEL (CONT’D)

There’s something I want to say to you, George, and you’re not going to believe me and you might even be pissed at me for saying it. But you need to hear it and I need to say it, so here goes. You don’t know that Shane was the love of your life.

George looks affronted and starts to speak, but Michael plows ahead.

MICHAEL (CONT’D)

You can’t know that he was the love of your life, and do you know why? Because guess what, you aren’t dead yet. You may feel dead right now, and believe me I’ve been there, but the fact is, until you’re lying under a tombstone of your own you can’t be sure about anything. You could prick your finger on one of your roses tomorrow, and as you’re climbing the stairs to get a Band-Aid you trip over one of the pugs and tumble to your death. Or you could meet a man in the checkout line at the grocery store--hell, you could meet a woman even, and fall madly in love with her and end up with six kids and twenty grandkids.

Michael looks over at Elena, then back at George.

MICHAEL (CONT’D)

You just don’t know, George. That’s the thing. None of us does.

He reaches out and rests his hand for a moment on George’s shoulder, then lets it fall.

INT. MICHAEL’S CAR - DAY

Elena and Michael driving down the highway with the top down. She’s behind the wheel, and she’s got her head thrown back, LAUGHING at something he just said. She stops, and he cocks his head.

MICHAEL

Do you hear that?

ELENA

What?

Faintly at first, and then gradually louder, we hear a woman’s LAUGH: artless, weightless, utterly abandoned. A bright, rippling arpeggio from the most joyful aria ever sung. Michael smiles.

MICHAEL

Nothing.

The LAUGHTER continues as the car heads off into the unknown.

FADE OUT.