Eternal (2 page)

T
WO

J
ulia dropped quickly to Bertel’s side to verify what she already knew. “Dr. Bertel! Dr. Bertel!” she shouted as she shook him fiercely. She put her hand to his mouth. Nothing. She laid her head atop his chest. Nothing. He wasn’t breathing, and his heart had stopped. She ran to the closet just outside his office, where he kept the defibrillator they’d ordered a few weeks ago.

Julia grabbed the defibrillator, ran back into the room, and turned it on. She ripped open Dr. Bertel’s shirt and stared for a moment at his chest hair, wondering if the defib paddles would make close enough contact with his skin. She wasn’t about to waste time trying to shave it. She applied gel to the defib paddles, then put one in each hand. The paddles shook. Then she realized it was her hands that were shaking. She took a shuddering breath, pressed the paddles against his chest, and leaned into them, muttering, “Twenty-five pounds of pressure.” Even though she knew no one was in the room with them, she looked around, shouted, “Clear!” just as Dr. Bertel had taught her, and pressed the discharge button. She felt the shock vibrate through her arms as his chest rose toward her. She sat back and watched the cardiac monitor. Still no heartbeat.

Tears streamed from her eyes as she pressed the paddles to his chest and shouted again in a choked voice, “Clear!” Still nothing. But out of desperation, she kept going. On the sixth try, the cardiac monitor finally emitted a series of beeps, and she turned to watch the jagged little lightning bolts rise and fall across the screen.

She heard a sudden gasp, like a swimmer coming up for air. She turned back to Dr. Bertel. His eyes fluttered; but instead of closing or blinking or looking at her, they seemed to be staring at some faraway place beyond the ceiling. Then Julia watched in horror as his eyeballs seemed to fill with blood, turning a darker and darker crimson, until the crimson turned into a deep black that engulfed his entire iris. She wondered if he had broken blood vessels in his eyes. But then the phenomenon disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, and his eyes returned to their normal gray and closed.

Still on the floor, Julia reached up, fumbled the office phone’s receiver from the cradle, and dialed the emergency room. Luckily, their research facility was on the same campus as the hospital. Still, Doctor Bertel had been without a heartbeat—dead—for at least five minutes, maybe longer. “I need emergency medical assistance in Research Building Three, basement level, Room 24. I think Dr. Caleb Bertel was electrocuted.”

“Is he breathing?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.

Before she could answer, a hand clutched her arm. She shrieked and dropped the phone, as Dr. Bertel took hold of her other arm too. This was not the flailing grasp of a man who had just died and been revived. The hand that gripped her felt like that of a trained killer eager to break her arm in two. His nails broke through her skin.

“You’re hurting me, Dr. Bertel! Dr. Bertel, stop!” She tried to pull back, but instead he pulled her close to his face, close enough to kiss. His eyes, usually so shy, were wild and bulging and bloodshot. They were the eyes of a madman.

Bertel pressed his cheek against hers and whispered in her ear in an unnatural, foreign voice,
“Tu m’appartiens!”
Then he lapsed back into unconsciousness, his head falling back to the floor and hands letting go of her arms so suddenly that she fell backward.

Julia rubbed her arms, which were sticky with the blood he’d drawn with his nails. But she didn’t notice that just yet. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“Tu m’appartiens!”
Her mother had spoken French to her since she was a baby, so Julia was almost fluent. She had no trouble understanding what Bertel had said:

“You belong to me!”

T
HREE

J
ulia left the room to make way for the paramedics to work on Dr. Bertel. Now that there was nothing left for her to do, all that had happened during the last minutes slugged her in the stomach. Clutching her abdomen, she stumbled into the bathroom, rushed into a stall, let her trembling legs give way, and vomited into the toilet, until nothing would come up but the last of that day’s Americano—the drink her mother always made fun of. “As if Americans know anything about making proper coffee,” she would say. At that moment, she felt a cool hand on the back of her sweaty neck.

“Thanks, Mom.” The sound of her own voice saying those words jolted her to awareness. She jumped up, banged open the stall, and careened out of the bathroom, leaning against the door as if to keep whatever was in there trapped inside. Julia shook her head violently. Dr. Bertel had convinced her there might be a soul, but she drew the line at ghosts.

It wasn’t the first time she’d had to redraw that line. The first time had been shortly after her mother, Michele, died of cancer.
Was it really only a year ago?
Julia supposed there wasn’t any good age to lose your mother, but during senior year seemed particularly unfair. Her mom’s death had sparked her determination to become a doctor. Julia couldn’t save her, but maybe someday she could save someone else’s mother.

Michele had warned Julia not to turn her whole life into a battle against death. “Remember that no one ever really dies. The spirit lives on,” she’d said. Although Michele Jones had respected science, she’d been deeply spiritual. She had only been a casual churchgoer, but she had believed herself to have a personal relationship with God.

For years, Michele had tried to share her beliefs with her daughter, but Julia had always been skeptical—not because she was a rebellious teenager, but because she was a devotee of the scientific method. From the time she was five, her father had taught her to question everything.

Julia could still remember the day she noticed a bowl floating in dishwater in the kitchen sink and asked, “Does everything float?”

“Let’s find out,” her father said.

“As long as you clean up the mess,” Mom told them. Then she sat back and watched, laughing as they turned the kitchen upside down.

But Dad didn’t just show her what floated and what didn’t. He asked her to come up with theories about why things worked and then to come up with experiments to test her theories.

So when Michele told Julia about God, the five-year-old demanded evidence. “Is God a solid, a gas, or a liquid?”

“God isn’t something physical that you can see or touch or smell.”

“Then how do you know he’s real?”

“You can feel him, inside.”

“I don’t feel him.”

When Michele died, it only made Julia more skeptical. If there were a god, why would he let her mother, someone who never hurt anybody, suffer through cancer? It made no sense.

Julia had known that her mother was disappointed in Julia’s lack of belief. So, after her mom died, Julia had compromised and made a go of giving in to one of Michele’s other passions: fashion. Michele Jones, née Michele Dedieu, had been a Frenchwoman through and through—and she’d believed in style almost as much as she’d believed in God. On the day of the funeral, Julia had stood at the bathroom mirror, her mother’s makeup and hot rollers lined up on the counter, a black suit hanging on the doorknob instead of her usual jeans and T-shirt. She’d cocked her head, tried to picture herself through the eyes of her fashionable mother, and plugged in the rollers.

“I don’t know how much good it’ll do,” she said to the mirror. “But this is for you, Mom.” Julia had rarely worn makeup, and she had no idea what she was doing. So she moved very slowly as she rolled her hair and applied lipstick, blush, eye shadow, and mascara. At one point, she blinked and jabbed her eye, smearing a black trail across her left lid. She had been forced to wipe off that eye and start over.

An hour later, Julia stared at the results. Beautiful curls framed her thin, oval face and flowed down her back. Her lashes had always been long, but now they looked almost false. Her green eyes looked downright tropical. She addressed the mirror again: “Who do you think you’re kidding with this mask?” But she could almost hear her mother’s delicate French accent tickling her ear, “You
are sooo beautiful. You see? Just a little eye shadow makes those gorgeous green eyes pop.”
The way her mother said the word “pop” always made her laugh.

The rain was unmerciful that day. At the cemetery, black umbrellas stretched in a large swath around her mother’s gravesite, keeping the stoic attendees dry. Michele had been well liked. Julia didn’t recognize most of the people.

When she came home that night, she ran into the bathroom, where she tore off her wet clothes and stared at herself in the same mirror. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, and most of her makeup had washed away from the rain and tears, except for two black circles of mascara under her eyes. She nodded in grim approval. “That’s more like it. Now you look like you feel.” The curls that had framed her face that morning now hung limp despite her mom’s extra-hold hairspray. “Now for a curl’s best friend,” her mother used to say as she sprayed a toxic cloud around her daughter’s head. Julia would pretend to sneeze, and they’d both giggle.

At that moment it hit her—Julia would never hear that sweet accent and contagious laugh ever again. She shivered. She felt cold inside her bones. Her rain-damp skin was covered in goose bumps. She needed to towel off and put on some PJs. But it was more than that. She sneezed. “I’m so cold, Mom,” she said.

Suddenly the bathroom’s small wall heater turned on next to her head, startling her. Simultaneously, the scent of gardenias filled the room. Julia knew that smell: it was her mother’s French designer perfume.
What…
She turned to stare at the heater. She knew she hadn’t pulled the chain to start it. Her dad had installed the heater years ago, because their San Clemente home was rarely heated in winter. Surely it couldn’t turn on by itself just because it was old. Though Julia was startled, the heat felt good on her skin. But that smell filled her chest with a painful ache of longing. Earlier that day, she had decided against wearing her mother’s perfume, knowing it would only make her cry more. Yet now it smelled as if her mother were standing right beside her. The heat and the smell together overpowered her senses until she grew dizzy and faint. She clutched the edge of the sink.

Then she felt it.

There was no mistaking it—the feel of her mother’s arms reaching around her sides to cradle her like she used to do. Julia almost expected to hear that sparkling laugh. She looked in the mirror but saw nothing. She was afraid to look behind her. Instead, she ran out of the bathroom and into her bedroom, where she sat on the bed, shivering again. This time she welcomed the cold, hoping it would snap her back to reality.

Her rational mind had long since written off the incident in the bathroom as nothing more than an electrical surge. As for the smell of perfume and feeling her mother’s touch, those could easily be explained by exhaustion and depression following the funeral. She’d been missing her mother, and in her sleepy state, she’d half-dreamed her presence. It must have been wish fulfillment, plain and simple, like Freud described. Still, she had to admit, she might not have been so eager to work for Dr. Bertel if that moment in the bathroom hadn’t made her curious about the possibility of an afterlife. So here she was, working on a project that, if it worked, would prove that her mother was not only right, but that she was still out there. Julia had never told her father the exact nature of Bertel’s current research, saying only that they were studying residual energy in the brain after death.

“Julia! Julia, what the hell is going on?!” Julia heard her father’s voice echoing through the corridor of Research Building Three and jumped back to reality. When he saw Julia’s disheveled appearance, Morton ran down the hall and grabbed her by the arms, his eyes frantically searching her face. “Are you okay? What happened? You’re bleeding.”

He let go of her, and they both stared into his palms covered in Julia’s blood. Julia reached up slowly like a sleepwalker and touched her arms where her father had grabbed her—where Dr. Bertel had grabbed her just minutes ago. So strong. How could Dr. Bertel be so strong after he just … came back from the dead? “I’m okay, Dad. But Dr. Bertel died—”

“He’s dead? What happened?”

“No. I mean yes. He’s alive now. But he died for a few minutes. I revived him with the paddles, and then he grabbed me.”

Her father wasn’t listening. “Can we get a medic over here? My daughter’s hurt!”

But the medics had their hands full. They were wheeling Dr. Bertel down the hall on a stretcher. One of them paused to take a quick look at her arms. “This isn’t life threatening. It’s probably easiest if you just drive her across campus to the emergency room, sir.”

Her father put an arm around her shoulder and started to walk her to the elevator. Then she heard a man’s voice behind her. “Wait a minute! Is she the one who revived him? I need to ask her some questions.”

Julia turned toward the voice, which seemed familiar somehow. She turned her head, and her eyes rested on a man that she had never seen before—but she knew him immediately. Their eyes locked, and her chest surged with a dense, pulsing heat, as if she’d just drunk another Americano, quadruple shot.

A surge of electricity ran through her like a lightning bolt. She felt herself drawing close, as if an unseen force were puppeteering their first encounter. Emotions washed over her in waves—shock, recognition, longing, love, loss. Then the basement seemed to fall away, and she no longer knew where she was.

For a moment she felt herself transported to another time and place—she was now standing in the middle of a garden with the same young man wearing a long flax tunic and carrying a book. Then, she was in the basement again, staring at him in a blue shirt with notepad in hand, listening to the elevator doors slide shut behind the stretcher carrying Dr. Bertel.

Desire cascaded over her body like a tsunami. She wanted to run her hands through his thick brown hair, to trace his chiseled features with her fingertips, to stare into his ocean-deep eyes—just as she felt she had done a thousand times before. The instant recognition and resulting shock were mirrored in his own eyes. It was as if they had been waiting for each other.

Then both worlds doubled, tripled, quadrupled, until she was spinning through a revolving door of centuries. She felt herself falling forward and saw two strong arms reach out to catch her. Then her world went dark.