The Transformation of Things (30 page)

Thirty-three

I
opened my eyes, and Will was standing there, by the window, watching the snow. He turned and smiled at me. “Good morning,” he said.

A steady sense of relief washed over me as soon as I saw him. “Will,” I said, my voice croaking out, slowly, scratchily.

He walked toward the bed, and he took my hand in his, brushing my knuckles lightly with his fingertips. “Good news,” he said. “You can go home soon.”

“Home?” I echoed.

“Ethel’s going to set you up with some physical therapy.”

“Physical therapy?” I pictured Ethel rubbing my temples.

“You’ll need to regain your strength,” he said. I looked around, saw the hospital rules for visitors on the door, and then I realized that was not the Ethel he meant.
Your subconscious plays tricks on you. Everything is not what it seems.
“But the doctors say you’ll be back to playing tennis by summer.”

“Tennis.” I thought about Amber and Bethany applying
their lipstick in the mirror, and I knew I never wanted to go back there, not even if they still wanted me.
You are in control of your own destiny.
That was not a life. That was not the life I wanted.

He leaned closer. “Jen, there’s something I need to tell you.” I nodded. “Dave is dead,” I said, remembering the feeling of Kelly lying next to me on the bed. “Dave?” He frowned. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

He frowned again. “Dave is fine, but his father passed away a few days ago.”

“Stan.” I pictured his face, the way it contorted as he said the word
stroke.
“Did he have another heart attack?”

Will nodded. “You really could hear us. The doctors were right.”

I wondered what else I heard, what was real and what wasn’t. “Will, who else was here besides you?”

“Your sister, of course. And Kat and her girls, and Lisa came by a lot. Your dad and Sharon came by a few times, and Dr. Horowitz stopped by once. Oh, and so did Janice.”

I thought about my father, about the way his voice had sounded when he told me I had my mother’s smile. Had I really heard him say this?

“And of course Ethel. My goodness, she’s been a godsend, that woman.”

I heard a knock at the door, and I looked up and saw Fat Ethel standing there. She walked in, breathing heavily as if the move from the door to the bed was too much for her. She hugged Will, then leaned in and hugged me. “I just wanted to wish you luck,” she whispered in my ear.

“Thank you,” I said, still feeling uneasy around this Ethel, the fake one who seemed astoundingly real to Will.

“Namaste,” she said.

I pulled back, startled for a moment, and then I said, “You know, I always wondered what that meant, namaste.”

She leaned up and smiled. “It is a coming together,” she said. “Of mind, body, and spirit. A recognition of this in one another.”

Choose it completely, with your mind, your body, your spirit,
I heard the other Ethel saying.

“That makes sense,” I said. “That makes perfect sense.”

After Ethel left, I fell asleep. I didn’t dream, and when I woke up, it was dark, and I was still in the hospital bed. Will was sleeping in a blue vinyl chair, his mouth open, his neck askew. “Will,” I whispered into the darkness. “Will.”

“Hmmm?” he murmured softly, smiling, even in his state of half sleep, as if he had been waiting for me to call to him forever.

It occurred to me that the last thing he remembered, he knew of us, was our nonargument when I goaded him on about Janice’s baby. Thinking about our life, our relationship then, brought tears to my eyes. I thought for a moment that we’d gotten it all back, and yet what if none of that had been real?

“Will,” I whispered louder.

He opened his eyes. “What is it? Are you feeling okay?”

I patted the space on the bed next to me, wanting him to get in beside me, wanting him to hold me, the way he had in what I was beginning to understand was only a dream world.

He stood up and walked toward me, and he sat at the edge of the bed. I grabbed on to his hand, held it tightly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think or dream or something,” I whispered.
He nodded. “I hate the way things were between us before. I don’t want to go back to that.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier,” he said, leaning in closer, stroking my cheek with his hand. “I’m not a judge anymore.”

“You got indicted. And there was money. In a briefcase?”

“Indicted?” He chuckled. “No, but you really did hear me didn’t you?” I shrugged. “The money in the briefcase.” He sighed. The image, the moment in the bar still felt resoundingly clear to me. I held my breath, waiting for the truth, and it was strange the way I felt as if I’d been waiting for it forever, though I guessed the absolute reality was, it had been only a few seconds.

“You know it wasn’t about the law anymore. It was all so corrupt. Lawyers wanting to buy me, and the Feds wanting to use me to catch them. That’s why I had that money—it was all a setup. And I’d had enough.” He cleared his throat. “That and you being here. Well, I just couldn’t do it anymore.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I couldn’t be away from you.” He paused. “I’ve been working a little bit for Dave, selling weed control of all things. He and Kelly insisted. They said I needed to get out of the hospital a little bit. You’re not mad, are you?”

“Oh, Will,” I said. “I never cared that you were a judge. I just want to be with you. I just want us to be us again.”

“Me too,” he whispered, lying down on the bed next to me, leaning in close, putting his arms around me, the way I’d dreamed him doing. “Me too.”

My first night at home, I checked my medicine cabinet for any signs of herbs before getting into bed. But there was
nothing there. Somehow, it was Western medicine that saved me, brought me back to life. Back into a real life.

Will and the doctors said I would make a complete recovery, that what happened to me was a fluke, and also the result of a poorly set up washing station at the salon, something for which Will said we could sue, but I’d already told him that it felt like the wrong thing to do. My neck had simply been at the wrong angle, and something had snapped. Something had to give. As Ethel the herbalist once told me, or maybe it was Ethel the social worker, a small crack was rarely just a crack, but the result of something bigger, something worse, lying just beneath the surface.

Now I got into bed, and I cuddled up next to Will. I rubbed his leg with my foot, which did feel oddly Jell-O-y, and probably in need of more physical therapy. I thought about my jogs in Oak Glen park, and how they’d felt so real. But I knew they weren’t, or my legs wouldn’t feel this way. Maybe I would start jogging there, though, and maybe when I was over there, I’d stop by Kelly’s more often, too.

Will rolled toward me, and he stroked my cheek with his thumbs, just like he had on Valentine’s Day. “I’m so glad you’re home,” he whispered. “I missed you so much.”

“Make love to me,” I whispered back, wanting to recapture it, the magic I’d felt that night.

“Jen, I don’t know. The doctors said to take it easy for a while—”

I cut him off by kissing him, and rolling on top of him. I pushed my body into him. He groaned, and ran his hands across my back.

Then we were naked, tangled up in each other, my body warm and tingling the way it was on Valentine’s Day. Will snored
lightly, and I lay there, with my eyes wide open. I was afraid to sleep here, in my own bed, where I remembered falling asleep and dreaming so many times. The dreams themselves still seemed so incredibly real, so incredibly close.

So I got out of bed, made my way into the kitchen, and made myself some coffee. Then I wandered into the computer room and checked the drawer where I kept my dream notebook, only to find it filled with a few empty reporter’s notebooks.

There was one notebook, though, sitting by the computer on the desk. I flipped through it, but it was not filled with the dreams I so vividly remembered writing down, but instead notes for the last article I’d written for
City Style,
about Chinese medicine, herbs, and a little old Jewish lady who’d practiced it. As I flipped through them, I remembered: I had visited her once, all in the name of journalism. She had checked my meridians and told me that she’d felt something there, underneath, and she’d even given me herbs. But I’d never taken them, never gone back. I’d written the article, and then promptly fell into my life in Deerfield.

I flipped through the rest of the notepad, and these notes were followed by some shopping lists and some auction phone numbers. And, on the very last page, scrawled messily, there was an idea for a novel and some quotes about dreams—one by D. H. Lawrence wondering whether dreams resulted in thoughts or vice versa, and one about an ancient Chinese philosopher who once dreamed he was a butterfly.

I remembered what it felt like to write my own dreams down, how it had felt oddly free, to write something again, to write something that was purely mine, entirely for me. I wished that had been real, that I had that notebook here with me now.

I turned on the computer, and in the glow of the half moonlight, I opened up a fresh document and started to type, before I forgot, this crazy story about what was real and what was dreaming, about how much you could know about another person and about yourself, about the difference between being a man and being a butterfly, and how sometimes there was no distinction, no visible difference at all.
The transformation of things,
I heard Ethel say.

I typed until morning, until I heard Will’s alarm go off, heard Will’s footsteps coming toward me.

“You’re writing again,” he whispered, sounding equal parts astounded and relieved.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I am.” I looked up from the computer to smile at him, and suddenly the exhaustion overtook me.

Will followed me into the bedroom and lay next to me on the bed. He held my hand and stroked my palm with his fingers. His touch made me feel alive, awake again. “What now?” I whispered. “You can’t sell weed control forever.” I was stating a truth that I had never been able to bring myself to say in my dream world.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe I could.”

“Tell me one thing you want,” I whispered.

He hesitated, then said, “I think I might like to work with kids. Be a teacher.” He almost put it out there as a question, because I knew he knew that the old Jen, the one he last remembered being here on that warm October day, would’ve scoffed at the idea.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “I think you’d be good at that.”

“You know, summers and weekends off. Good hours.” He paused. “We’d probably have to move.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“But I want to be around more, if we have kids,” he said. “And even if we don’t, I don’t want to miss everything.”

“Good.” I rolled over, so my body was leaning close into his. “I don’t want you to.”

“What about you?” he asked. “What’s one thing you want?”

“This,” I said, snuggling in closer to him. “You. And I think I do want to write still, finish that novel.”

“That’s two things.” He laughed. “No fair.” He paused. “I want you to have it all, Jen, everything you’ve ever wanted.”

“I know,” I said, feeling groggy again and too close to sleep to really make the words come out the way they were supposed to.

“Sweet dreams,” he whispered, kissing my hair.

Let’s hope not.

If I dreamed, I had no memory of it when I woke up, feeling utterly rested, my head completely clear and not throbbing at all. Will lay next to me, awake, and I wondered if he’d been watching me sleep.

“Are you hungry?” he whispered. “Can I make you something?” I was hungry. Starving. So I nodded and thanked him. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll bring it up to you in bed.” Part of me wanted to protest, but I saw the way his face, his eyes lit up, and I knew that this would make him happy, taking care of me.

He stood up, and I noticed, for the first time, the two little porcelain figurines teetering on the edge of his night table just behind his alarm clock: “The Perfect Family” and “Afterglow.”

This sense of panic overtook me as I wondered which reality I was in. I heard Ethel’s voice.
Was he a man, dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly, dreaming he was man?

“Where did you get those?” I asked Will, pointing to the figurines.

“Oh, these?” He shrugged, picking them up. “I bought them for you in the hospital gift shop. Here.” He handed them to me. “They’re yours. They’re silly, but …”

I heard Ethel’s voice again:
You make your own reality.

“No,” I said, taking them and holding them between my palms. “They’re not silly at all.”

Thirty-four

I
t is swampy in Boca Raton in July, and I sit in my white folding chair and fan myself with the program. “Do you want a drink?” Will asks. “I can get you a water from inside the hotel.”

“Yes.” I rest my hand on my growing belly. “We’re thirsty.”

He kisses my forehead. “I love you,” he whispers.