Wish You Were Here (33 page)

It is a Facebook message from Eric Genovese, with a cellphone number and an invitation to call.

Eric Genovese tells me that in his other life, he lives in Kentwood—a suburb of Grand Rapids he’d never heard of before and had never been to, before he was hit by a car. “My wife’s name is Leilah,” he says. “And my little girl is three.”

I notice he uses the present tense.
Lives. Is.

“I do computer programming there, which if you know me here is laughable,” Eric says. “I can’t even figure out my TV remote.”

“When I was in the Galápagos, months passed,” I tell him. “But here, it was days.”

We have been on the phone for an hour, and it is the most liberating conversation I’ve had in over a month. I had forgotten that I messaged him, it’s been so long—but Eric apologizes and says he doesn’t use Facebook much anymore. He completely understands what I’m talking about when I say that I was somewhere else while I was lying in a hospital bed; that the people I met there are real. He doesn’t just give me the benefit of the doubt—he dismisses the people who are too narrow-minded to know what we know.

“Same,” he says. “My wife and I have been together for five years in Kentwood.”

“How did you get back here?”

“One night we were watching
Jeopardy!
like we usually do, and I was eating a bowl of ice cream. And it was the damnedest thing—my spoon kept going through the bowl. Like it was a ghost spoon, or something. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I couldn’t go to bed, either, because I had the weirdest premonition that this was just the beginning.” He sighs. “I don’t blame my wife. Leilah thought I was going crazy. I called in sick to work and stared at the spoon and the bowl the whole day. I kept telling her that if the spoon wasn’t real, maybe
nothing
was. She begged me to call the doctor, and when I wouldn’t, she took Maya and went to her mom’s place.” He hesitates. “I haven’t seen them since then.”

“What happened to the spoon?”

“Eventually, it got bright red, like a coal. I went to touch it and burned my hand and it hurt like hell. I started screaming, and then the room fell away like it was made out of paper, and all I heard was yelling and all I felt was pain. When I opened my eyes, there was a paramedic pounding on my chest and telling me to stay alive.”

I swallow. “What about after that? When you came back?”

“Well,” he says. “
You
know. Nobody believed me.”

“Not even your family?”

He pauses. “I had a fiancée,” he admits. “I don’t anymore.”

I try to reply, but all the words are jammed in my throat.

“Do you know what an NDE is?” he asks.

“No.”

“Near-death experience,” Eric explains. “When I got out of the hospital, I became obsessed with finding out more about them. It’s when someone who’s unconscious remembers floating over his body, or meeting a person who died years ago, or something like that. Ten to twenty percent of people report having them after an accident, or if their heart stops.”

“On Facebook, I read about this farmer,” I say excitedly. “In the middle of bypass surgery, while he was under anesthesia and his eyes were taped shut, he swore he saw his surgeon do the Funky Chicken. When he said something after surgery, his doctor was shocked, because he does wave his elbows around in the OR—it’s how he points, so he doesn’t contaminate his gloves.”

“Yeah, exactly. It even happens during cardiac arrest, when there’s no brain activity. Have you ever seen the MRI scan of someone with end-stage Alzheimer’s?”

I feel a shiver run down my spine. “No.”

“Well, you can literally
see
the damage. But there’s hundreds of reports of patients with dementia who can suddenly remember and think clearly and communicate just before they die. Even though their brains are destroyed. It’s called terminal lucidity, and there’s no medical explanation for it. That’s why some neurologists think that there might be another reason for NDEs other than messed-up brain function. Most people think that the cerebral cortex
makes
us conscious, but what if it doesn’t? What if it’s just a filter, and during an NDE, the brain lets the reins go a little bit?”

“Expanded consciousness,” I say. “Like a drug trip.”

“Except not,” Eric replies. “Because it’s way more accurate and detailed.”

Could it be true? Could the mind work, even when the brain doesn’t? “So if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, where does it come from?”

He laughs. “Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be working for Poland Spring.”

“So, this is what you do now? Armchair neuroscience?”

“Yeah,” Eric says, “when I’m not doing an interview. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to talk to someone about this who doesn’t think I’m a whack job.”

“Then why do them?”

“So I can find her,” he says flatly.

“You think your wife is real.”

“I
know
she is,” he corrects. “And so is my little girl. Sometimes I can hear her laughing, and I turn around, but she’s never there.”

“Have you been to Kentwood?”

“Twice,” Eric says. “And I’ll go back again, when we don’t have to quarantine anymore. Don’t you want to find them? The guy and his daughter?”

My throat tightens. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’d have to be ready to accept the consequences of that.”

He’s lost a fiancée; he understands. “Before my accident, I was Catholic.”

“I read that.”

“I never even met anyone Muslim. I wasn’t aware there was a mosque in my town. But there are things I just
know
now, part of me, like my skin or my bones.” He pauses. “Did you know that the Sunni believe in Adam and Eve?”

“No,” I say politely.

“With a few differences. According to the Quran, God already knew before he created Adam that he’d put him and his offspring on earth. It wasn’t a punishment, it was a plan. But when Adam and Eve were banished, they were put on opposite ends of the earth. They had to find each other again. And they did, on Mount Ararat.”

I think I like that version better—it’s less about shame, and more about destiny.

“Don’t you feel guilty?” I ask. “Missing a person everyone else thinks you invented? When all around us, because of the virus, people are losing someone they love? Someone
real,
someone they’ll never see again?”

Eric is quiet for a moment. “What if that’s what people are saying to him, now, about you?”

Kitomi tells me that someone has made an offer on the penthouse. A Chinese businessman, although neither of us can imagine why someone from China would want to come to a country where the president refers to the virus as the Wuhan flu. “When would you move?” I ask.

She looks at me, her hands resting lightly on the railing that borders the reservoir trail. “Two weeks,” she says.

“That’s fast.”

Kitomi smiles. “Is it? I’ve been waiting thirty-five years, really.” We watch a flock of starlings take flight. “How disappointed would you be if I decided not to auction the Toulouse-Lautrec?” she asks.

I shrug. “I don’t work for Sotheby’s, remember.”

“If I don’t consign it,” she asks, “will you
ever
work there again?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “But you shouldn’t make a decision based on me.”

She nods. “Maybe I will have the only ranch in Montana with a Toulouse-Lautrec.”

“You do you,” I say, grinning.

For a moment I just hold on to this: the wonder that I am walking at dawn with a pop culture icon, as if we are friends. Maybe we are. Stranger things have happened.

Stranger things have happened
to me
.

Kitomi tilts up her head, so that she is looking at me from under the rims of her purple glasses. “Why do you love art?”

“Well,” I say, “every picture tells a story, and it’s a window into the mind of the—”

“Oh, Diana.” Kitomi sighs. “Once more, minus the bullshit.”

I burst out laughing.

“Why art?” Kitomi asks again. “Why not photography, like your mother?”

My jaw drops. “You know who my mother is?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Diana,” she says, “Hannah O’Toole is the Sam Pride of feature photography.”

“I didn’t know you knew,” I murmur.

“Well,
I
know why you love art, even if you don’t,” Kitomi continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “Because art isn’t absolute. A photograph, that’s different. You’re seeing exactly what the photographer wanted you to see. A painting, though, is a partnership. The artist begins a dialogue, and you finish it.” She smiles. “And here’s the incredible part—that dialogue is different every time you view the art. Not because anything changes on the canvas—but because of what changes in
you
.”

I turn back to the water, so that she can’t see the tears in my eyes.

Kitomi reaches across the distance between us and pats my arm. “Your mother may not know how to start the conversation,” she says. “But you do.”

On my way back home through the park, I discover that I have three messages from The Greens.

I stop walking in the middle of the path, forcing joggers to flow around me. “Ms. O’Toole,” a woman says, moments later when I redial. “This is Janice Fleisch, the director here—I’m glad you finally called back.”

“Is my mother all right?”

“We’ve had an outbreak of Covid at our facility, and your mother is ill.”

I have heard these words before; I am caught in a cyclone of déjà vu. I even remember my lines.

“Is she…does she need to go to the hospital?”

“Your mother has a DNR,” she says delicately. No matter how sick she gets, she will not get any life-saving measures, because that’s what I deemed best when she moved there a year ago. “We have multiple residents who’ve contracted the virus, but I assure you we’re doing everything we can to keep them comfortable.”

“Can I see her?”

“I wish I could say yes,” the director says. “But we aren’t letting visitors in.”

My heart is pounding so hard that I can barely hear my own voice thanking her, and asking her to keep me updated.

I start walking as fast as I can back home, trying to remember where Finn put the toolbox we use for emergencies in the apartment.

They may not be letting visitors in. But I don’t plan to ask permission.

I ask the Uber to drop me off at the end of the driveway, so that I can detour across the lawn away from anyone who might see my approach. For once, Henry’s car is not at The Greens, and the bird feeder outside his wife’s porch is empty. I can think of only one reason.

I push that thought out of my mind. The only silver lining is that there will be no witnesses for what I’m about to do.

Although I have wire cutters, I don’t really need them. One of the lower corners of my mother’s screened porch is peeling at the base, and all I have to do is hook my fingers underneath and tug hard for the screen to rip away from its moorings. I create just enough space to wriggle through and step around the wicker chair and table where my mother usually sits when I come for my visits. I peer into her apartment, but she isn’t on the couch.

I don’t even know, really, if she’s here. For all I know, they’ve moved all the Covid-positive residents to a completely different place.

I pull on the door of the slider that opens into the porch. Thank God my mother never remembers to lock it.

I tiptoe into the apartment. “Mom?” I say softly. “Hannah?”

The lights are all turned off, the television is a blind, blank eye. The bathroom door is open and the space is empty. I hear voices and follow them down the short hallway toward her bedroom.

My mother is lying in bed with a quilt thrown down to her waist. The radio is chattering beside her, some program on NPR about polar bears and the shrinking ice caps. When I stand in the doorway, her head turns toward me. Her eyes are feverish and glassy, her skin flushed.

“Who are you?” she says, panic in her words.

I realize that I am still wearing the mask I wore in the Uber, and that all the times I have visited her, I have stood in the fresh air not wearing one. She may not know me as her daughter, but she recognizes my face as a visitor she has had before. Right now, though, she is sick and scared and I am a stranger whose face is half-obscured by a piece of cloth.

She has Covid.

Finn has drummed into me, daily, how little we know about this virus, but I’m counting on the fact that I still have antibodies. I reach up and unhook one side of my mask. I let it dangle from my ear.

“Hi,” I say softly. “It’s just me.”

She reaches toward her nightstand for her glasses, and has a coughing fit. Her hair is matted down in the back and through pale strands I can see the pink of her scalp. There’s something so tender and childlike about that it makes my throat hurt.

She settles her glasses on her face and looks at me again and says, “Diana. I’m sorry, baby…I don’t feel so good today.”

I fall against the frame of the door. She hasn’t called me by name in years. Before Covid, she referred to me as “the lady” to staff, when they talked about my visits. She has never given me any indication that she knows we are related.

“Mom?” I whisper.

She pats the bed beside her. “Come sit.”

I sink down on the edge of the mattress. “Can I get you anything?”

She shakes her head. “It’s really you?”

“Yeah.” I remember what Eric Genovese said about terminal lucidity. Terminal. Whatever is causing this clarity from her dementia—whether it’s fever, or Covid, or just sheer luck—is it worth it? If the trade-off is knowing that it means she’s probably going to die? “I’ve been here before,” I tell her.

“But sometimes I’m not,” she says. “At least not mentally.” She hesitates, frowning, like she’s probing her own mind. “It’s different, today. Sometimes I’m back in other places. And sometimes…I like it better there.”

I understand that viscerally.

She looks at me. “Your father was so much better at everything than I was.”

“He would have argued about that. He thought your work was brilliant. Everyone does.”

“We tried to have a baby for seven years,” my mother says.