Emily & Einstein (31 page)

I continued on. But the farther I climbed, the more my muscles strained, and I had the fleeting thought that this wasn’t working.

I kept going, my breathing more labored by the second as several runners passed me like they were running on the flat. A girl and guy flew by, talking about some movie they had seen the night before. My feet were barely moving.

“You can fly.”

The words surprised me, but I pushed them away as I came around another curve, praying the top was near. But I knew better. There was an even steeper incline between me and the top.

By then, every inch of me cried out to stop. Suddenly it all seemed crazy and I started to rationalize. I told myself it was just a run. Not an Olympic event. No one cared if I ran or walked or staggered over to Central Park West and caught the subway home. No one knew I had any interest in running the marathon. Not even Einstein knew that I hoped to run farther than my daily reservoir jaunt.

But I knew; I would know if I quit.

Head down. Focus. But my muscles wouldn’t loosen up and my lungs burned as a man of no less than seventy buzzed past me. A woman, whose legs flailed behind her, cruised by like I stood still. And when every inch of me ached to stop at the same time a mother with a jogging stroller and sleeping child went by, I couldn’t do it anymore.

I staggered to a halt halfway up the hill with a curse. I closed my eyes, my fingers pressed to my lids as if I could keep emotion in check.

“Damn it!” I yelled.

“Fly, baby girl, fly!”

The memory hit hard and fast, spurred no doubt by Jordan’s book, of my mother on the beach, the same water I had nearly drowned in the night before rushing around her ankles.

I hadn’t told my mother what had happened to me in the ocean. When she found me in my room the next morning, I was packing my tiny suitcase. I demanded that she take me home.

“What, you’re done here?”
she said, half laughing, half put out.

“Yes. I want to go home.”

“Why? Give me one good reason why.”

I considered what to say. I didn’t know any other eight-year-olds who had to present valid arguments for anything they wanted. I had seen more than one kid in my class throw a fit to get their way. I had tried that once, never again.

I opted for a piece of the truth.
“I don’t like the water.”

“The water? You?”
She shook her head, then smiled.
“Emily Barlow, you might make me want to pull my hair out half the time, but I’ve never known you to be afraid of anything. Don’t tell me you’re going to start now?”

My tiny fists knotted at my sides, my face burning.
“I am brave.”

“Then prove it.”

Lillian Barlow raced out of my room barefoot, her nightgown fluttering around her as she hurried down the stairs and flew out onto the beach while the rest of the world was still asleep.

“I am brave,”
I repeated under my breath, fear battling with something more complex. But I followed, scampering after her. When I got to the beach, the early morning salt air hitting me in the face, she skipped around me.

“See! My daughter, Emily Barlow,”
she shouted up to the sky
, “is afraid of nothing!”

Then she took my hands and twirled me in circles, laughing, dancing, as happy as I had ever seen her, until my feet came off the sand and I flew.

“Fly, baby girl, fly!”

Over the years, there hadn’t been much about how I lived that she agreed with. But she had admired the fact that I was brave, that I wasn’t a quitter.

And before I realized it, standing halfway up Heartbreak Hill in Central Park, I flung my head back and cried out into the early morning sky, its edges now entirely blue. Then I started to sprint. I didn’t jog; I didn’t run at a decent pace. I ran hard, pushing my body, making every muscle and tendon scream. When I came to the top, the skyscrapers along Fifty-ninth Street standing faintly in the distance, I looked out, my throat tight, my eyes burning, but this time with joy. I could do this. I could run the marathon.

It was a moment of pure truth that spurred another.

Sandy hadn’t kept his promise. Sandy had died. And before that I had tried to win Sandy back, only to have my efforts tossed in my face. Those were the facts, facts that I realized I could live with. And when I started down the other side, headed for home, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

As soon as I got to Caldecote, I went straight to Mercy Gray’s office. Without knocking, without saying hello, I said, “Something isn’t right.
Ruth
shouldn’t be failing.”

She beat her pen on the blotter and considered me before she tossed it aside and picked up the phone. Over the course of the day, she called sales reps, who called accounts, who called bookstores. She didn’t have any answers for me, but when we got the numbers the following week
Ruth
had started to sell.

In one of Tatiana’s meetings, the tension around her mouth had eased. “But we’re not out of the woods yet,” she said.

The following week the numbers exploded. When I saw Tatiana in the hall, our eyes met, though neither of us spoke because each of us knew what the other was waiting for.

At the end of the day on Wednesday, I walked into Tatiana’s office when I knew the
New York Times
list was being released. Mercy came in behind me. Tatiana didn’t have to ask why we were there. We had formed a team of sorts, each of us wanting to be together when we heard the news.

Tatiana looked at us. “It didn’t make it.”

I gasped.

Mercy shook her head. “The
Times
list is a strange beast, part actual numbers, part voodoo. Who really knows? Let’s hope
Ruth’s Intention
hits enough of the other lists so that the
New York Times
has to take notice.”

Sure enough,
Ruth
showed up on every major list in the country. All except the brass ring of lists.

I tuned out Tatiana’s frustration. I ignored Victoria’s renewed relief. I sent e-mails to the
Times
Book Review. When I wasn’t trying to figure out what more I could do, or swallowing back an aching disappointment, I threw myself into rebuilding my list. I set up lunch dates with agents. I read every proposal I could get my hands on. Then on Wednesday of the following week at the end of the day, Tatiana walked into my office.

“Number seven.”

“What?”

“Ruth’s Intention
just hit the
New York Times
Best Sellers list at number seven.”

I stared at her in shock, which quickly shifted to pure unadulterated elation. Just when I stood, to hug her or dance her around the room or who knows what, Birdie raced in. “Oh, my God! Congratulations!”

Tatiana looked at me over Birdie’s head. In the months Tatiana had been at Caldecote, I had never seen her smile. Today she gave me her usual crisp, no-nonsense nod. But when she turned to leave my office, I saw her pull a deep, relieved breath and I’m almost certain she smiled.

I didn’t know why the book started to sell, how it bucked the normal trend with increasing rather than decreasing weekly sales. Had the boxes of books been sitting unopened in bookstore stock rooms? Had something gone wrong in shipping? Had it been shelved in the wrong sections of stores? No one had answers, at least none that they were willing to share. All I knew was that a book that deserved to sell had. And I had made it to the top of Heartbreak Hill.

When everyone left my office, I closed the door and raised my arms in my own Rocky air pump. Max had been right. I could survive and I had.

Emily Barlow was back.

einstein

chapter thirty

“Let’s have a party!”

My wife wanted to have a party?

If I didn’t know better, I would swear my wife was getting over me. Which was impossible. Right?

I growled at myself. Of course it was impossible. I was not one to experience doubt.

Truth to tell, I blamed my shaky feelings on that Max fellow. Had I still been a man I might not have liked that he was young, handsome if you went for that type, and clearly capable of achieving any sort of physical quest that he wanted, but I could have fallen back on my own good looks, massive amounts of money, and fine old name. As a dog, well, I had nothing on the lad. Which didn’t sit well with me.

Thankfully, he was a young one and seemed a decent match for Jordan. Had he been Emily’s age, I might have been concerned. But if I knew anything about my wife, it was that she wasn’t the type to fall for a younger man. She was too sensible for that.

As to the party, I had always intended to entertain. Fresh out of college I held a few impromptu gatherings, more a result of late-night drinking and ending up at my apartment than planned affairs. Then I got busy at the firm, got busy training for the marathon, got married.

And then, well, I got dead.

It was the first week of August and the plan was to have a back-to-work party after Labor Day.

“It’s perfect,” Emily told Jordan and me. “Everyone will be back from summering here and there, and Jordan, your book will be done! It will be both a welcome back and celebration party.”

I didn’t really care what the reason for the party was. A party was a party. As to Jordan, I saw what I felt certain was genuine excitement on her face. I had the feeling that she had begun to think about morphing into some kind of literary star.

For half a second, Emily mumbled something about doing the cooking herself. “But who has time?” she said, looking at me. “Besides,” she snorted, “all I’ve done recently is bake.”

So she hired a caterer to take care of the food, though it turned out the woman who showed up wasn’t an actual caterer.

“Thank you for letting me do this!” a woman named Birdie said.

“If your first love is cooking, why are you working at Caldecote?”

She wrinkled her pert little nose. “After I moved here it was the only company that would hire me. Though, truth to tell, I only got the job at Caldecote because of my sister.”

“Why don’t I know any of this?”

Birdie smiled and patted Emily’s cheek. “Maybe at heart I’m not so different from you with secrets to keep, and looking for a way to start over.”

The woman was cute if you went for the perky Texas type, her accent thick as bourbon laced with honey. I’d never been one for perky, but then she kneeled in front of me and exclaimed, “Look at you! Sweet as sweet can be, I just love you!”

What could I do? I wasn’t one to argue with good taste, so I decided to adore her.

I sat next to Emily on the library sofa.

“How about stuffed mushrooms?” Birdie suggested.

Growl.

Emily looked at me. “Too done?”

Bark!

“You’re right,” Birdie said, like she had no more trouble taking advice from a dog than my wife had.

I sat back and half listened, half participated. I felt relaxed. Had I not been worried about the final destination of my soul, I realized I could have lived quite the contented life basking in the sun and indulging in Steakin’s at my Dakota apartment while I waited for the grand prize of greatness that awaited me when I finished helping my wife.

Which reminded me of the apartment. My mother and even my lawyer had gone strangely silent. Just like Emily, I had come to hope that Mother was throwing in the towel. But I knew Althea Portman. She had never in her life rolled over in a fight. Which meant she was doing something to regain the apartment. We just didn’t know what it was.

As has been established, I never knew how much my wife made in salary. It had had no bearing on me when I was a man. She had never once asked me for money, so I assumed she made plenty. When something needed to be done to the apartment, we split the bills, though she did the work. When she wanted to redo something, we split that too. In hindsight, I realized that as an associate editor, or even as an editor and now a senior editor, she couldn’t have come close to making the kind of money I earned on Wall Street. Yet she had never complained when I asked her to pay for her share of some new addition. That sound system which I loved, for example.

Out of habit I scoffed at the thought that I should have done anything differently regarding our bills. Water under the bridge, and all that. Besides, hadn’t I paid the maintenance and taxes on the apartment? And wasn’t she the one who had insisted that she contribute to everything else—those equal rights, and all? What was I supposed to do, turn her money away?

The stab of nausea brought me up short. I tripped over the carpet in my study, stumbling, hitting the floor with a woof. I laid there for a second, my heart skittering. I wanted to chalk the nausea up to yet another impending case of flu, but by then I knew better. I was fading again, but this time the sensation was even stronger.

Was it possible that the old man had decided I was hopeless after all? After all this, was he giving up on me? For no good reason!

My stomach heaved.

Terror raced through me as I realized that the essence of Sandy Portman was … what? Being pulled out of Einstein’s body?

The nausea grew. I felt a sucking burn along with a sickening light-headedness, as if I had cut myself and blood was rushing away from my heart to the wound.

Okay, okay, there was a reason for this. I needed to keep going deeper into this awful insight to figure out what had precipitated this new round of fading.

My mother not forgetting the apartment? Could that have caused this?

The party? Me wondering where Emily was getting the money for it?

The sound system?

My hackles rose as something like a shock ran along my nerve endings. Good God, I was fading over a bloody sound system?

For half a second I was incensed, and with that my vision went blurry. All I could “see” were the thoughts in my head, memories, and suddenly I saw myself standing next to Emily at the high-end electronics store, as excited as a child over a sound system that would rival a small theater’s.