City of Masks (27 page)

"Fine by me." Paul poured her glass full and topped off his own. They both drank and looked out at the view.

That lasted about one minute.

"I mean, what?" he asked. "You're living with someone? You're HIV-positive? You're a lesbian? You belong to religious cult that forbids intimate relationships with psychiatrists?"

They were both able to laugh, that was nice, but Cree's trepidation grew. She put her hand over his, the best she could do for an answer.

Paul was looking increasingly unsettled. "Look, Cree, you want my marital resume in twenty-five words or less? It's pretty humdrum - your typical postmodern tale of white-collar love. I'm thirty-nine. Lived with various girlfriends when I was younger. Finally got married about seven years ago, wanting to hang in for the long haul. Got divorced last year, some resentments and bruised hopes on both sides, but sort of semi-amicably. She relocated to Atlanta. It's one reason I moved to this place get a fresh start, you know? I'm still a little rusty at living single. But I like to think I'm wiser now, I move more slowly into relationships now — " His eyebrows jumped as he looked down at their clasped hands on the table. "Present circumstances excepted, obviously."

It had all come out in a rush, and when he was done he paused to take a deep breath. "Sorry it's not more exotic or . . .
epic
or something." His face moved in wry self-disapproval, but then he rallied and met Cree's eyes. "Your turn."

Cree thought about it. She was tired, and the familiar pit of despair opened and drew her toward it. It occurred to her that she faced a clear choice: She could give in to that dark attraction, stay confined within the limits she'd imposed on her life since Mike died, become ever more a ghost. Or she could yield to the sweet magnetism that filled the night air between her and Paul.

She sipped some wine. The blowing mist thickened and began to condense into drops that beaded on her face and rolled intermittently off the umbrella.

Paul gave her plenty of time but at last broke in on her confusion. "If it'll help at all, I can tell you that I haven't waited on a doorstep in the dark for anyone since I was . . . I don't know, maybe sixteen?"

"Mine is maybe a little
too
epic. You up for that?"

He tried to smile. "From you, I'd expect nothing less."

Maybe it was the need to honor that unspoken compact she'd forged with Lila. Maybe it was just the wine on an empty stomach, or the big, beguiling, rainbow ghost of New Orleans, the Big Easy. But she did, she began. It was the first time she'd ever tried to lay it all out in plain language. The words came haltingly at first but gradually began to pour until she couldn't have stopped it if she'd tried.

They'd met at U Penn, where she was getting a degree in psychology and he was studying art and film media. Mike was a dark-haired, blue eyed Irish kid from Illinois whose goal was to get into animation production. They married while they were both still in school. He lingered around Philly for a year while she got her bachelor's degree, then they moved to New Hampshire so he could take a job with Imagitech, a Manchester firm that was producing a new generation of digital animation equipment and software. They lived in a ramshackle farmhouse outside of Concord, surrounded by abandoned hayfields that looked down on the back forty of a commercial apple orchard. They'd decided to have kids later, but they had two dogs and two cats and it was very much a family. They'd never had to think about their love, or getting married, they'd never analyzed it. It was just something that flowed, easy and uncomplicated; it always felt
inevitable.

Mike adored his work. The technical side of it exercised his talents for math and engineering, while the cartoons and other visual fantasies he created expressed his whimsical, dreamy side and his absurd sense of humor. Cree admired the way the two sides balanced in him.

Cree worked for the county, helping counsel individuals and families in the social services system. She eventually wanted to go on for her master's degree in psych, get into research, but for now she felt her job did some good for people, and besides life was so nice. It all wove together. Deirdre and Mom were still in Philly then, and she visited them often. She and Mike had good friends in Manchester and Boston. For seven years, it seemed that this was how it worked, this was what life was about. Rather very much lovely.

Telling Paul about it now, she paused, unable to say some things. There was making love beneath the scraggly crabapple tree in the tall meadow grass they never mowed. Mike's broad, muscular body above hers, hard yet so gentle, the earth beneath her back and the grass parted around them clean and sweet, the timeless currents running through them both. Without thoughts, their desire and the ground's fertility and that inevitability all merged into one thing that was who they were and what life was

"Can I ask something?" Paul said. "When you say you wanted to do research, you mean in parapsychology, or - "

"Oh, God, no! I never once thought about any of that stuff. If somebody had asked me about ghosts or ESP, I'd have said I was a skeptic. I was just fascinated with the human mind, and I was good at talking with people, empathizing with them . . ."

Paul nodded.

Suddenly Cree doubted she was up for this. "Look, Paul, that's the easy part. I've never . . . I don't know if I can - "

"Don't, then. Only if you want to."

Cree thought about that for only an instant.

So then Mike had to go out to Los Angeles. Big company meeting with some Hollywood heavies, Spielberg or Lucas or somebody. Everybody was excited, this was the big break not just for Imagitech but for the whole field of computer animation. Mike and the four other company principals flew out, intending to be gone for three days and to come back rich. Cree took the opportunity to go visit Mom and Deirdre in Philly. She had a great visit with Deirdre and the six-month-old twins, already demure and contentious, and talked to Mike at his hotel that night.

The next day she went clothes shopping downtown. Just after noon, she was making her way through the crowded sidewalks on Market Street when she saw Mike, of all people, standing forty feet away. After her initial feeling of sheer surprise, she felt delight - how nice he looked, how fun it would be to spend some time in Philadelphia with him. He was facing slightly away from her and seemed to be searching through the crowd, and before he saw her she took a moment just to admire him. He was wearing the suit that she had helped him pick out for his trip, a flattering cut, he was very definitely the most handsome man on the whole street. At last he turned her way and his face moved in recognition; she waved and smiled and began walking toward him. She thought of a salacious line to greet him with, as if he was a stranger and she was picking him up. He watched her intently, his eyes burning with feeling, lips moving as if he had something very important to say and was overcome with emotion. His intensity caused her to feel a rush of worry — for the first time, it occurred to her something must have gone wrong, maybe with the Industrial Light and Magic meeting, for him to have come back so early. But even as she thought that, she knew with certainty that together they could fix anything, whatever it was they'd ride it out, they'd be okay. She continued making her way toward him through the lunch-hour crush, and his intensity grew, and she felt a stab of fear, realizing something really bad must have happened. Maybe his mother had died, he'd flown back earlier and called Mom to find out where she was, came straight from the Philly airport on the off chance of finding her here. When she was only a dozen feet away, a vendor rolled a concession cart between them, and when he passed, Mike was gone. She turned around in a full circle, she ran after the cart, she scanned the street and the sidewalks and saw him nowhere. She called his name; no one answered. She
shouted
his name, getting frantic, and people around began to give her odd looks.

His sudden disappearance confused and scared her, especially when she thought of the intense, unspeakable feeling in his eyes. Suddenly she realized how wrong the whole thing was. She'd just talked to him on the phone last night, how could he have gotten here from L.A. so quickly? What were the odds he'd be able find her in central Philadelphia at lunch hour? From a pay phone, she called Mom's house. But she hadn't heard from him. She called their number in Concord and got their messages off the answering machine, but there was nothing from Mike. She called his mother, who said no, she hadn't heard from Mike since before he left on his trip, was everything all right?

Three hours later, she called Concord again and heard the message from the Los Angeles police. Mike had been riding in a rented car with three others from his company, the voice said, when they were hit broadside by a pickup truck that ran a red light. Two of the people in the car had been killed. One of them was Mike.

She knew it was a mistake, but it still scared her almost out of her mind. When she called LAPD and got the right person on the line, she heard the news again.

"No, there's been a mixup," she told the cop. "He's back here - I just saw him. It must be someone else."

But the policeman insisted he had personally recovered the identifica- tion from the corpse. The dead man's appearance, as he described it, was very similar to Mike's.

"Who were the other people in the car?" Cree asked, panicking now.

The names were Mike's colleagues at Imagitech. The other person killed was Terri McNamarra, Mike's fellow VP and good friend.

Cree said, "Maybe the wallets got mixed up during the accident — "

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Black. His boss - Mr. Lederman - was still conscious at the scene. He identified the body."

But but but. But she had
seen
him, here, alive! She had looked into his eyes!

For a full day, she refused to believe Mike had been in that car. She kept refusing, insisting there had to be a mistake - first because this
couldn't
happen to him, to her, to their marriage, and second because she had
seen him alive in Philadelphia.
She kept up the denial until she flew to L.A. to identify Mike's body herself She later determined that he'd been pronounced dead at the scene only moments before she'd seen him there on the street in Philadelphia, three thousand miles away.

Cree stopped and found her way back to New Orleans, which seemed choked with fog, unreal. She'd hoped it would be easier, but it felt as though things were breaking loose inside her chest. The pain seemed impossible, open-heart surgery without an anesthetic.

She had never encountered him again. No physically manifesting phantom, not even a sense of his presence. For a long time, she wished she could. Just one more moment together. But it didn't happen. The only ghost that remained was the one that lived in her memory and that box of photos that had to be locked away.

Later, trying to make sense out of what had happened, she went over and over the scene, trying to glean every detail. The Mike she had seen that day had not been bloody and broken, but handsome, beautiful Mike wearing the new suit he'd bought for the trip and the tie she'd given him for Christmas, the breeze making his hair do that thing that irritated him but that she liked. Did he cast a shadow? Was the background faintly visible through him? Much later, having played the sight back so many times that the memory lost its integrity, she could see it any way she chose: Yes, he cast a sharp shadow on the sidewalk, no, he didn't; yes, he was solid as anyone else on the square, no, he had a slightly misty or translucent look.

One thing she knew for sure, though: It had been Mike, Mike and no one else, who had looked into her eyes that day with that inexpressible emotion. Somehow space and time and corporeality had permitted him to visit her in the minutes after his death. Mike had sought her and found her.

Much later, she'd learned that the occurrence was among the most common paranormal experiences: the spectral visitation by a geographically remote loved one at the moment of death. The survivor's conviction that the manifestation was physically real was also typical.

Of course, the statistics didn't explain how it happened. Nor help her come to grips with it.

In the end, all she hoped was that whatever he had experienced at that moment, he had seen the smile on her face, understood it for what it was:
Oh, my beautiful Mike is here, what a wonderful surprise! Hello, my sweet, how I
love you.
Surely that was obvious, surely he couldn't mistake it for anything else. Whatever he took wherever he went afterward, she hoped he'd remember that.

It deflected her entire life, her whole being. Suddenly she was alone and heartbroken. Every simple assumption had been smashed. The days of anything clear and straightforward had died with Mike.

She also had a huge mystery right in her face, obstinate, undeniable. To cope with that, she started doing some reading. After a while she went back to school, studying psychology, philosophy, religion, anatomy and physiology, history - whatever seemed to promise hope of an explanation.

Or was it really explanation she wanted? Cree sometimes wondered. Maybe it was more a search for a way back to Mike. She spent her life looking through windows into other dimensions of the world, and into the past, observing and interacting with the ghosts that lived there. She claimed to be a scientist, but in the end maybe it all came down to the simple hope that one day, through one of those windows, she'd see Mike again. Just one more glimpse.