Dylan and his sister are in the garage. He’s standing in the doorframe that leads into the kitchen. She’s two steps below him on the concrete floor, pointing at her convertible and yelling at him.
“You drove? You took my car?”
“And I brought it back safe and sound, all in one piece.”
“When were you planning to tell me?”
Dylan answers with a victorious grin.
“Do you want to be arrested? Is that it? Do you want to wreck my only way to get to my only job—”
“Overreacting!” Dylan pronounces.
“There is no such thing as an overreaction to that kind of moronic behavior.”
“I didn’t get arrested. I didn’t even get pulled over. Nothing got wrecked.”
Marina and Dylan hold their words for a time. He kicks at the metal threshold beneath his feet. She paces to the workbench.
“Why did you do it?” she asks. “How did you do it?”
“It doesn’t take a genius to put your foot on the gas and turn the wheel.”
“You just walked on out here and drove away.”
“It was like catching a wave.”
“Liar.”
He doesn’t contradict her.
She continues, “How many times?”
“Just once.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
Last week? Seriously? It took me how many days to get here?
“C’mon, let it go,” he says. Her questions are starting to irritate him.
“Where did you need to go that was so important?”
“Where did you go with Jade?” he challenges.
“Is it illegal all of a sudden to go out with my friends?”
“I don’t know, is it?”
His tone has changed. His words are little shoves instead of light volleys. Is he angry at Sara? Marina? At the anxiety that governs his life? Me? He’s sixteen—probably all of the above and more.
Marina hears the change and knows what do to. She has always known what to do.
“Jade had a job she thought I’d be interested in. Something that pays more than the waitressing.”
“What kind of job?”
“Stealing cars and hawking off the parts.”
Dylan’s eyes go wide and he gives off a hoot. “So it is illegal.”
“Like driving without a license, yeah.”
“Oh, not even close! I yield this contest to you, dear sister.” He folds an arm across his waist and bows.
“You’ve been spending too much time in that fantasy gaming world of yours, little brother.”
“Name your prize,” he says with exaggerated drama. “What would you have me surrender?”
“I’m going to see Dad. I want you to come with me.” Her face is straight.
A visit to a grave site. Now there’s a ritual that I’ve never completely understood or been inclined to embrace, though it has been forced upon me the way Marina forces it on her brother now. I don’t wish this on him, and I question her method.
“You were supposed to make me tell you where I went,” Dylan says.
“I want this. You’ll brag to me about your little adventure all by yourself someday.”
“I won’t go. I can’t.”
“Apparently you can get out of the house when it’s important enough. This is important, Dylan.”
Dylan swears. “You go. That place freaks me out.”
“Says the guy who spends hours creating digitized zombie lands.”
“Key word: digitized. Not real. Therefore, not freaky.”
“I’ve gone alone too many times.” She approaches him at the steps and looks up at him. “First Mom, then Dad . . . if you quit on me too I might start thinking Jade is my only real friend.”
“And then you’re going to blame me for your downward spiral into a life of crime.”
“You can bet on it. Next thing you know, I’ll be in jail and they’ll impound my car and foreclose on the house and you’ll be living on the streets.”
Dylan rolls his eyes, but she has succeeded in easing his mood. “It doesn’t make any difference to anything if I go or not.”
“How would you know? It isn’t about you.”
“We’re going,” Marina says, extending a hand as if to help him down the steps.
I watch him for signs of panic. They aren’t immediately apparent.
Frowning, Dylan kicks the threshold one last time, then stoops to pick up the shoes he’s kicked off beside the door. He doesn’t take her hand, but he follows her down into the garage.
“The least you could do is let me drive.”
This time I make no effort to follow them. I stand in the garage as the double-wide door goes down, hoping Sara will finally decide to take care of them in ways I can’t.
After a few seconds the overhead light automatically blinks out and the world goes black. Well, that was stupid. Even if I could find the light switch I wouldn’t be able to move it.
My blindness makes the garage seem larger than it is. I seek the boundaries of the space like a mime, both hands up in front of me, palms flat against empty space, shuffling to the wall, the door, the steps. They’re gone. I can’t find the edges of this blank universe. I can’t even find a toolbox to trip over or a volleyball to sit on.
But I’m not alone.
“Why do we lie to the kids?” Sara asks me again, picking up the conversation she so suddenly abandoned days ago. Or was it only hours? Seconds? I go still in the blackness.
“We lie to protect them,” I say. “They don’t need to know everything, even when we wish they did.”
“I’ll probably call them children forever.” Her words have smiles in them. “They’ll be eighty and I’ll be on my deathbed, and I’ll say, ‘How’d you spend your day, kids?’ ”
Maybe she didn’t hear me. “We always want to protect them.”
“They don’t know I’m here, and that seems like a lie too,” she says. “Lying by omission, isn’t that what it’s called? I don’t know why I’m so scared.”
“What do you mean they don’t know? Where is here?”
“I think we lie because we’re afraid, don’t you?”
This conversation confuses me. “Afraid of what?”
We’re both silent for a while. She says, “Do you think it’s possible to redeem one lie by telling another?”
“No. I’ve tried it. No matter how many lies you tell, they each just make the first lie wor—”
“I just wonder.” Is she even listening to me? “The world looks different at forty-three than it did at twenty-three. I’m not as dogmatic as I used to be.” She lets that thought sit there before she says, “I bet you’re not either.”
I twist around in the blackness, a spinning dog chasing an invisible tail, but I can’t find her. I can’t see anything at all.
“I’m sorry for what I did,” she says. “I’m sorry about everything I thought was right that turned out to be so, so wrong. Do you think we ever get it right?” She has drifted to a distance. She’s leaving me. “I’m not sure we can. But I promise you, I will try.”
“Sara,” I plead.
There is no answer but the sound of a door opening: a hand depressing the lever, releasing the latch, letting loose a puff of air as the seal breaks open.
A stale breath of recycled air flows over my face, and I blink. Above my head, an air conditioner exhales through a vent.
I’m standing outside a closed door, certain I’ll encounter something bad if it opens. Something that will overcome every good thing in the world if it’s turned loose.
But I can’t leave the door either. I’m stuck here, straining my senses for a clue to what’s here, and then maybe permission to leave it: voices, music, scents, a sudden chill.
I hear Musak. I smell disinfectant. I see stiff carpet under my feet. It’s brown like the door, utilitarian. Come or go, it seems to say. Whatever you do, don’t hang around here.
I hear footsteps coming from the left and turn my neck to look. My children are headed toward me: Marina wears a sundress that is effortless and classy at the same time. Sunglasses on her head, car keys clutched in one hand, she walks like a woman on a mission. Dylan lags behind, looking around for monsters that might be trailing him. The anxiety has kicked in now. His hands are shoved into his pockets. I see all his courage, his body a tough container for all that thrashing fear. Marina shouldn’t have made him come here.
Here? Where have we gathered? What is this place, if not a cemetery? A mortuary, I guess and then reject. The place looks more like a hospital than a church. A morgue, then. A medical examiner’s domain.
After all this time? But what do I know about how long it’s really been?
My thoughts distract me, and I don’t move out of the way in time to avoid Marina. She plows through me and shivers. Goose bumps run down her arms and up the back of her neck. She looks up at the air conditioner for a second and then leans into the door.
Her hand depresses the lever, releases the latch, lets loose a puff of air as the seal breaks open.
I take several steps backward into the opposite side of the hall.
“C’mon,” she tells Dylan as she stands in the white mouth of the room, which sucks at me like a black hole. She waits for her brother and pushes the door all the way open, dragging me toward her without knowing what she’s doing. Dylan neither rushes nor slows. The rhythm of his steps—right, left, right, left—is all that’s carrying him right now.
Marina is patient, eyes on him. So I’m the first one to notice that someone else is already in the room. A slender silhouette of a woman backlit by the noontime sun coming in through the window. Her arms are crossed easily across her ribs, and she turns toward the open door like someone who has been expecting company.
Dylan finally enters the room and is the second to notice her. He loses track of his measured pace and the toe of his shoe trips on the carpet. Like a speck sucked into a vacuum cleaner, I can’t resist tumbling in to join the meeting. I go against my will.
The bad thing happens.
Marina asks Dylan to help her find something, but I can’t make out the word because my eyes are locked on myself, lying right there in the center of the room, not atop a silver table or inside a silk-lined casket, but on a fully equipped hospital bed, chained to the earth by tubes and cords and machines.
I’m at the center of this bizarre universe, both parts of me; I’m both the living sun and the most distant, dead rock of a planet. Lightweight blankets cover that bony body. A squishy pillow cradles the head. Even as I stand at the foot of the bed, I can feel the softness of it at the back of my neck. The face is bruised and broken almost beyond recognition. The skin is unnaturally colorful, purple and green and sickly yellow. The cheekbones seem higher and the hollows underneath deeper, the eyes sinking under a quicksand of skin. Every cell weak and dying.
But these foreign parts are me. My bones, my eyes, my skin. The pain pulsing behind my shattered cheeks and crushed ribs is suddenly, tangibly real. My arms and legs are casted. My hands are wired to receive food, my chest to give information to the noisy monitors in the wall above my head and on rolling pedestals by my side. A machine is pumping me with oxygen that makes me light-headed.
The heart monitor claims that I’m far more alive than I understood. Alive and angry. The chirping pulse rate picks up its pace. What kind of deception is this? I worked so hard to reach my kids one last time. The long walks, the electric encounters, the tumbling through time and space—do those amount to nothing more than a neat little near-death trick?
Someone ought to have told me the rules.
In spite of the mechanical assistance I struggle to breathe. The weight of the broken bones in my chest is unbearable. I’ve never noticed them before this moment, when they have finally become incapacitating. My heart is in a vise. I couldn’t take two steps if I tried.
Marina shoves a doorstop under the hospital room door to hold it open for Dylan. He presses his back to the wall, eyes locked on the woman at the window.
My daughter goes to my side, disapproving of my matted hair. She tries to flatten it without pressing on my skull, which is both a wasted effort and the most healing touch I’ve ever experienced, living or . . . or whatever this state of being is. I don’t deserve her kindness, but I need it more than I need that ventilator to pump air into my deflated lungs. My throat is tight and my eyes burn. There is a bloody bandage on my elbow. My hand is wrapped in gauze.
“These wounds just won’t heal,” she says. Her fingers flit to the cut I thought I received from Ian’s winery, the finger I clipped on my own file cabinet.
“How is he today?” Marina asks.
The woman we all think is a nurse steps away from the glare and approaches the bed, standing opposite Marina. As she does, the solid black mass becomes a person with all her own features. Sara. I’m surprised all over again. I glance at Dylan and see that he recognized her before I did. But he comes no farther into the room.
“He’s about the same,” Sara says.
“But the nurse who called me said—”
“I never said I was a nurse, Marina.”
Marina takes my hand. The softness of her fingers, the warmth and strength of her gentle grip flow all the way up my arm. “Yes, you did. You said there were some new developments in Dad’s situation.”
“I did. But he’s the same.” She looks apologetic. “I was a little vague. Maybe I wanted you to make assumptions.”
Marina takes a fresh look at Sara and loses her tongue. I can see my beautiful girl trying to assess her. Dylan hasn’t looked at me in the bed since he entered the room. He has eyes only for Sara, eyes that are both wishful and guarded.
His laugh is tight. “You guys look more alike together than you do apart,” he says.
It’s true, glaringly obvious. This is what scares Marina the most. I see the fear in the glance she sends Dylan’s way, their roles suddenly reversed. He removes his hands from his pockets. He takes only one breath for every two of hers.
“What new developments?” she asks Sara. And then Dylan: “What do you mean ‘apart’?”
“This is Misty,” Dylan tells his sister. “Misty. Rochester. Becker.” He annunciates each name plainly, and his calm demeanor is as unexpected as Marina’s nervousness.
Sara extends her hand to Marina. “I’m Sara,” she corrects. “Sara Rochester.” Marina doesn’t take Sara’s hand, but Dylan reaches out tentatively.
“I found our mom,” he says. “Right? You decided to own up to it?”
Marina’s face is stone. Her fist tightens around the keys she carries.
Sara squeezes Dylan’s fingers and nods. They release each other quickly. “I’m your mother.”