Moondance (12 page)

Lara’s voice was distant, and he was vaguely aware of his own, acknowledging her words.

“What happened then?” he asked, and her voice responded as the warmth spread over his back and out through his forehead, face and chest.

“That’s great,” he said, and the images came to him like a door opening on its hinges, as if he was seeing into the present, into the dynamic web that was the universe, the hidden interconnections of thought and emotion, the levels of energy underneath his own reality, and the words that offered understanding.

“I’ll be here,” he replied, his body stationery, yet feeling as if it was being lifted up, suspended, every pore open to new understanding, absorbing the words and the images and the messages offered up to him, despite his best efforts to shut them out.

“Love you too.” The click of the phone in his ear. His mind filled like a hot air balloon, the pressure full and inviting.
Why don’t you write it down?
Dr. Reynolds’s words echoed from six months before. He hadn’t seen her since, though once he’d called her office and asked her to renew his prescription.

Two hours passed. The cool air in the living room settled into the muscles in his back. He lurched up from the floor and headed upstairs to bed. Instead, he went into his office and turned on the computer, his face illuminated by the monitor’s incandescent glow. Contemplat-ing. Trying it on. He stared out the window as if the night could give him answers, his mind active and full. The computer monitor flashed once more as Windows booted up, winking at him.
How do we start Michael? It’s your move
.

Quickly, before he could change his mind, he created a new folder under Michael’s Stuff and Our investments. He didn’t know what to call the folder, so he left it as NewFolder1 and added password protection. He created a new Word document, saved it as Doc1, and exited the document, rolling his chair back so the keyboard was out of arm’s reach.
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

His heart was pounding and his head hurt. He double-clicked on Doc1, sliding his eyes away from the blank screen, and put his hands on the keyboard. With his eyes closed, he typed, fitfully at first, just one phrase, over and over,
the end of the beginning is the beginning of the end the end of the beginning is the beginning of
... Stopping suddenly, he hit the return key and typed: The beginning. Two lines down, he typed slowly and then faster, the ideas coming as fast as he could type, the structure of his visions taking shape.
Could he do this?
Blood infused his chest, his head, opening, welcoming him.

As the sun came up, he climbed into bed, euphoric, unafraid and exhausted. He fell asleep almost instantly.

• • •

ON SUNDAY MORNING, HE slept until noon then got up and went for a bike ride. Two hours later, he walked up the drive, sweating, clear-headed and invigorated. Lara’s car was parked in their narrow driveway.

Michael found her hanging up a load of laundry. She glanced up as he came in. He wrapped his arms around her from behind. At first, she stiffened. He moved his hands over her shoulders and nuzzled her neck, his eyes on her reflection in the mirrored closet. He rocked back and forth, his mouth moved, and her initial uncertainty dissolved into a conscious decision as her hands began
unbuttoning her shirt. Her eyes were open now and she tilted her head and leaned into him, turning to one side, kissing him fully, her hands up and winding in his hair. He watched her in the mirror, and slid his hands over her full belly and dropped to his knees, resting his head there, just under her breasts, blowing air and caressing her, his fingers gently moving between her legs, watching as she responded.

Later, he was inside her, his eyes slits and his mouth soft, and he glanced at their moving bodies in the mirror — she on her side, he behind her, his back arched then tensed forward, her sounds rising and falling with his movements, his lips in the curve of her neck, and then his mind tripped, like a hiccup, and Lara’s skin changed and he felt as if he was moving inside someone else, understood that someone else’s golden hair was fanned over the pillow, someone else’s child was growing inside her, and that Lara’s short breaths came from a different source, and then he was back, their perspiration slick, guiding his hands, creating her own friction until she climaxed, his signal to move toward his own.

As they fell asleep, spooned together, he watched her side move up and down as she breathed. In their reflection, Michael imagined that in his wife’s hand, which was curled up under her chin, she supported a mask, and as Lara shifted to find a more comfortable position, he moved with her and watched the space over her hand, where the mask would be. He imagined how it felt, what material it was made of.
Rubber
, he thought. Something that would wear well, yet be warm and flexible enough to look real.
Yes, rubber
.

Before he left their room, he couldn’t resist leaning over and kissing Lara on the cheek, watching himself in the mirror as he did, an androgynous figure hunched over her small sleeping form. As his lips touched her warm skin, he could smell her soap, the night crème she used, and Paul Mitchell’s Awapui shampoo.
So real
.

As he left their room, the visions inside him rose, seeking release, and as he gave them shape, the pressure ebbed, and he realized that it wasn’t Lara’s mask at all: she was the same as she’d always been. It was he who was changing, and though he did not know where it would lead them, he knew that he would no longer try to stop it.

chapter 17

ALTHEA WAS LIVID. SHE had worked every day for the last fourteen days until after midnight, including the weekends, on an advertising pitch that was broad-sided.

It was after eleven o’clock at night. They had just ordered pizza. The office was a frenzy of activity that was accelerating as they came down the home stretch, hyperactive from lack of sleep. The pitch was due at 9:00 the next morning. At 11:30, Rob, Continuum’s vice president, walked in and held up his hands.

“Hold it, hold it,
hold it!
“ he said. “We got a three-day reprieve.”

The room had fallen silent.

“And we’re going to take a different approach.”

Fuck you
, Althea had thought. Her team was already pushed to its limit.

It was the summer after first year of the MBA program. While Celia worked with her father in Europe, Althea returned to Continuum on the promise that she’d get some global marketing experience with a new client.

She should have known it was too good to be true. Less than a week after she started, Rob had asked for her help. She had been reluctant. Preparing a pitch was brutal at the best of times. It had already sucked up two hundred thousand dollars worth of staff time and free
creative ideas, with no guarantee they’d get the business. Though if they
did win, it would mean an additional million a year for Continuum.

Rob described the new approach, which would keep them working sixteen hours a day for the next three days.

Althea stormed out.

• • •

WEDGED IN STOP-AND-go traffic, her hands gripped her steering wheel. She could hear her engine wheeze, wanting to give out.

“Come on, darlin’, don’t die on me now. Not today, please not today.”

Simone was looking for her, she knew, but she didn’t care. A white Mini with black racing stripes cut in front of her just as the light turned amber. She hit her horn in frustration.

“Where are you people going at this time of night?” But she knew: there was a baseball game. And the rain didn’t help.

Thinking of Rob, fuming, she turned on the radio to CFNY, now called The Edge 102, the new rock station that had started out as an independent and been swallowed up by a corporate conglomerate. Trent Reznor was singing Head like a Hole. “I’d rather die, than give you control,” Trent screamed. Althea turned up the volume. She needed to wake up. She may have left the office, but she still had hours of work to do. Trent’s anguished cries absorbed some of the tension she was feeling. At the stoplight, she checked her cell phone. She had two calls: one from Simone. Another she recognized.

Inching through the traffic, she did a mental work-back to determine when they’d need her input. She glanced at her gas gauge. It read full. She knew that wasn’t right.

• • •

MICHAEL DROPPED OFF STEFAN, Exeter’s new CEO, at the King Edward Hotel on King Street, just east of the financial district. Earlier, the Canadian group had taken their visitors to a Blue Jays baseball game, followed by a late meal at Ruth’s Chris steak house. It was late and Michael wanted to get home. To see Lara and their new baby and more importantly, to continue what he had started a few months before.

Elizabeth Lara Bradshaw-Foster was a serene child, possessing quiet wisdom. Her eyes were silver blue, like Lara’s, with sparse, white blond hair. Since Elizabeth was born, Michael had stopped taking antidepressants.

His fingers tingled as he wove through the traffic. He couldn’t wait to get to his computer. During the meetings that day, his intense note-taking had nothing to do with Exeter’s acquisition strategy. When he had an idea, he had to get it down on paper before it burst and was blown away. Sometimes, he wished he could turn his eyes into his head and see where all of the ideas were coming from. Instead, he listened to the speakers at the meeting and watched their mouths, his mind elsewhere.

The traffic was heavy. To avoid the Don Valley Parkway, which was constantly under construction, he headed north on Jarvis. He pulled in to a Shell station to get gas, waved at the night manager, Milo, who knew him. Milo’s black lab, Coal, worked his shift with him and was curled up outside. Coal was the best-behaved dog Michael had ever seen.

He rummaged around his trunk, looking for his wallet. He retrieved it, and stepped into the gas bay.

• • •

SHE PULLED OFF JARVIS into a Shell station. A short, balding man with an immaculately pressed cotton shirt was outside talking to a customer. A black lab trotted happily behind him. As she filled up, she glanced around at the other cars: a navy blue Golf, an old Saab convertible and a blue Lexus. The owner of the Lexus was rummaging through his trunk. The black lab ran to greet him, winding around his ankles. As he pumped gas, the man stooped to scratch the dog behind the ears.

Althea went to pay. The Lexus driver held the door open for her. A wedding ring glinted in the fluorescent lights. Their eyes met for a moment and he smiled.
Green eyes
, she thought and her heart flipped. She looked away.

“Hey Milo, you taking any time off this summer?”

“Me? Never! I love my customers too much.”

“You’re a dedicated man, Milo. A rare breed.”

“My wife — she says I’m obsessed. You ready?”

It took a moment for Althea to realize that they were waiting for her. She paid him.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

The Lexus driver looked at her and smiled, a vaguely familiar teasing
lilt to his voice.

“Milo’s a hard man to say no to,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve been trying to leave him for years now.”

“You never leave,” Milo said. “You always come back.” The man laughed. Althea took her change and left.

As she approached her car, she noticed a piece of paper sticking out from behind her front tire. It wasn’t there before, so it must have come from the man’s trunk when he was rummaging around. She looked at the man who was still chatting with the clerk. He was using his hands to describe something, and the clerk was laughing. She picked up the paper, which was muddy and wet, and considered waiting until he came out. She looked down quickly. Handwritten notes from margin-to-margin. A diagram that took up the bottom third of the page. Arrows and labels.

Her cell phone rang. She noticed the man was staring at her, smiling.
Where did she know him from?
Turning away, she answered the call.

“Yes?”

“I just read your most recent story. Where are you?” Althea tucked the soaked page under the windshield wipers of the Lexus and turned to get into her car.

• • •

HE HAD NOTICED THE woman with thick red-gold hair as soon as she got out of her car. She was frowning, her mouth narrow. As he pumped gas, Coal bounded toward him and wound around his legs. He stooped to pet the dog.

“What a rainy mess, huh Coal?”

He and the woman had arrived to pay at the same time and he’d pushed the door open for her. Their eyes met and he remembered her. The woman on the side of the road almost a year ago. Different hair cut, but he was pretty sure it was her. As the woman’s eyes met his, she looked down and moved toward the cash. Michael fought an impulse to say something to her, and remembered the first time they spoke. That look in her eyes, not so different from now. He tried to break the ice with small talk, thinking that she might remember him.

“Thanks,” she said, looking away.

“Hey Milo, you taking any time off this summer?”

“Me? Never! I love my customers too much.”

“You’re a dedicated man, Milo. A rare breed.”

“My wife, she says I’m obsessed. You ready?” Milo was speaking to the woman, who was distracted, her eyes darting. It took a moment for her to respond. She paid him.