The Transformation of Things (28 page)

I stopped thinking, and I kissed him back.

* * *

I was lying naked, on my side in the bed, Will’s arm around me. I stared at my phone on my night table, willing it to ring, willing Kelly to need something. It stayed silent.

I heard Will’s soft and easy breathing in my ear.
Don’t fall asleep,
I willed myself, and then, when it was clear that I was going to, I chanted Kelly’s name, over and over again in my head.

But in the seconds before sleep, I had a thought not about Kelly, Kat, Lisa, or even Will. But about myself. About this strange feeling I had, a feeling that settled in my stomach and washed over my body, a sudden and intense melting, like sunshine hitting snow.

I was lying in a bed. I looked around. White walls, small TV hanging from the ceiling, and a sign by the door, “St. Francis Hospital: Rules for Visitors.”

“Do you know where you are?” a woman asked.

“Yes.” I nodded. “What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Dave?”

“Dave?” she said. “Can you tell me your name? “

For a minute, I was stumped. Who was I? Lisa? Kelly? And then I caught a glimpse in a mirror hanging over a sink, and I was myself. Jennifer Daniels Levenworth.

“Do you know your name?” the woman repeated.

I nodded. “Jennifer,” I said. “Jennifer Daniels Levenworth.”

“Very good,” she said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

I remembered Will’s hand running up my thigh, and then feeling him inside me. But I wasn’t going totell her that, so I said, “Dave. My brother-in-law had a heart attack. That’s why I’m here. Isn’t it?”

She shook her head. “Do you remember getting your hair washed at the salon? Pierce Avenue, I think.”

I nodded. “That was months ago,” I said. I heard Jo’s voice in my ear. “Isn’t that your husband?”

“Yes,” she said, seeming oddly perplexed. “It was. “

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Ethel,” she said. “Ethel Greenberg.” I looked at her. She was no Ethel Greenberg. She was middle-aged with red curly hair, and verging on morbidly obese.

“You’re not Ethel,” I said.

She pointed to her name tag, which clearly read in bold red letters “Ethel Greenberg.” “I’m a social worker,” she said. “I’ve been checking in on you. Trying to help your family and your friends. Your husband.” I looked around for him, for Will. “He went home to get some dinner,” she said, as if she could read my mind. “But he’s been here with you, a lot.” She paused. “You’re lucky, you know, to have someone like that.” I thought that I should ask her why I was here, and how long I’d been here, but before I could say anything, I heard a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Ethel said. I looked up, and there was Will. Tall, handsome, curly-haired Will. “There he is,” Ethel said, smiling. “He can’t stay away.”

He saw me staring, and he ran toward the bed. “She’s awake,” he said to Ethel. Then to me, “You’re awake.”

“Yes.” Ethel nodded. “It’s only been a few moments. I’ll go get the nurse and leave you two.”

Ethel waddled out, and Will took her place by the bed. He buried his head in my chest, and when he sat back up, he was crying. “Jen,” he said. “Jen. Jen.” He paused. “I’ve been so scared of losing you.”

He put his hand on my earlobe and fingered a star earring.

“Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” I sang softly.

“You heard me,” he said. “You heard me sing it when I put them in your ears last night.” He paused. “Ethel said you could hear us, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Of course I heard you,” I said. “In Il Romano.” In the dim wash of candlelight, I’d watched the stars glow.

“The doctor said you were dreaming. You were dreaming, Jen. You were here last night. You’ve been here for a while.”

I shook my head. “I’m so tired,” I said. “I’m sorry. I need to sleep. “

He squeezed my hand and leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Just promise me you’ll wake up,” he said.

Thirty-one

J
en,” Will said, shaking my shoulder. “Wake up.” It took me a moment to react, and then I opened my eyes and looked around. Blue curtains, maple hardwood floors, blue damask comforter. My bedroom. The first glow of daylight peeked through the window. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost seven,” he said. “You slept all night. You must’ve been exhausted. I tried to wake you for dinner, but I couldn’t get you up.”

I sat up, realizing that my stomach was empty, that I hadn’t eaten anything since dinner at Il Romano. “I’m starving,” I said.

“Do you want me to make you something. Eggs? While you get ready to go to the hospital.”

The hospital.
The dream came back to me and hit me, crushing me like a boulder rolling all too quickly down the side of a mountain. And then I remembered what Ethel had said, about that philosopher who’d dreamed he was a butterfly,
and then when he awoke, wondered which it was, if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
The mind plays tricks on you,
Ethel had said.
Sometimes things are not as they seem.

“No, no eggs,” I said. “I’ll just grab a granola bar.”

“Well, at least let me make you some coffee.” He paused. “And I can come with you, if you want.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You should go to work. I’ll be fine.”

He hugged me and whispered into my hair, “If you need anything, you call me.”

“I will,” I agreed.

While Will went downstairs to make coffee, I called Ethel and left her a message, telling her I was stopping over in forty-five minutes. It’s not so much that I wanted answers—though I did—but that I wanted to see her, see that she was still there, in her converted garage among her shelves and shelves of pill bottles. I wanted to make sure she was real.

I rang the bell on Ethel’s garage first, and when she didn’t answer, I walked up to the front door of the house and rang that one. Two rings later, she opened the door in her bathrobe, holding on to her cup of coffee. “Jennifer,” she said, sounding surprised to see me.

“I left you a message,” I said.

She held open the door and ushered me to come in. “What is it?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”

“I need you to tell me what you meant, that thing you said about the man and the butterfly.” She looked perplexed. “The man dreaming he was a butterfly—”

“Oh, that,” she said.

“I mean, how do you know the difference?” I lowered my
voice to a whisper. “I’m not sure I know the difference.” I wondered if this was real, standing here with Ethel, or if I was dreaming now, if what was real was me in the hospital for whatever reason.

“Oh, Jennifer. We need to get you off that herb,” she said. “I meant for it to calm you, and look at you, you’re a mess over these dreams. I want you to stop taking them immediately.” She paused. “And I want to check your meridians, see where all this anxiety is coming from.” She put her hands over my stomach. They were warm and solid hands. “Could be the liver.”

I wondered when Ethel checked my body, my meridians as she called them, with her electrical impulses if she could figure out why my dreams had gone crazy, telling me the truth about other people, or maybe just the truth about myself. “I have to go,” I told her. “My sister’s husband is having surgery this morning, and I promised her I’d be there.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I have an opening on Friday. Stop back then, and we’ll check everything out.” She paused. “You should embrace your dreams, Jennifer. You’re very lucky. People who dream can figure things out, can dig deep into their subconscious in ways that other people cannot.” She paused for a minute, as if wanting to let what she’d said settle in the air. “Namaste.”

I saw Beverly and Stan first, sitting in the waiting room, Beverly huddled into her husband, her fur coat on her lap. “Where’s my sister?” I asked. Beverly ignored me, and Stan pointed in the direction of the atrium. I nodded a quick thank-you toward him, then stopped. “If you guys are here, where are the kids?”

“With your father.” Stan shrugged.

I pictured Caleb, Jack, and Hannah throwing simultaneous tantrums, in a circle around Sharon, and my father sitting idly by. But I didn’t know that for sure. I had absolutely no idea what kind of grandparent my father really was, a thought that made me feel a little sad.

In the atrium, Kelly sat in one of the red chairs my father had been in the day before. “Hey,” I said, waving. “You all right? I saw Beverly and Stan in the waiting room.”

She shrugged. “It’s her son. I can’t tell her not to be here.”

“I know.” I nodded.

“Do you remember waiting here, when Mom was in surgery?” I nodded again. “Do you remember how it felt?”

“I was terrified,” I said. “But I pretended not to be because you were so calm.”

“I wasn’t calm,” she said. “I wasn’t calm.”

“Dave’s going to be fine.” I reached out for her hand.

We sat there for a little while in silence, until I finally said, “Do you want me to get you something to eat, or some magazines to read?”

She shook her head, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe some magazines. To pass the time.”

“I’ll go down to the gift shop.”

“Tabloids,” she said. “Something really trashy.”

“Of course.”

I remembered my way to the gift shop, just down the hall from the atrium. I remembered Kelly and I had walked in there together, just after our mother came out of surgery. We’d pooled a week’s worth of lunch money and had bought her a miniature teddy bear with a “Get Well Soon” stick balloon in its hands.

Our mother had gushed over how much she loved it, over how it made her feel better already, and I could still remember
the nausea I’d felt swelling in my stomach, seeing the bandages across her chest, the stiff way she sat up in the bed.

I shook the memory away. I hated it when the bad ones came, when the good ones seemed to be buried in my mind so deep that I had a hard time locating them, even when I wanted to.
Her voice. Her smile.

Then I looked up, and at the other end of the gift shop by the door, I saw the woman from my dream. The faux, fat Ethel Greenberg. She was dressed in a red tent dress that clashed with her red curly hair. She caught my eye, and she smiled, then walked out the door. I turned to run after her, to glimpse her name tag, but by the time I got to the hallway, she was already gone.

As I walked back into the gift shop and picked through the tabloids, I considered my options.

A. I was dreaming now. In reality, I was the one in the hospital.

B. I was awake now. My dream last night had been a combination of things my psyche had dug up, a fat woman I’d probably seen in the hospital yesterday. I had been taking an herb for the last several months that somehow allowed me to experience moments of my friends’ lives.

Either possibility felt mildly insane. I could not be dreaming now. How could I be? Everything felt so real, the smell of Lysol and urine in the hospital corridor, the sounds buzzing over the intercom.

Everything else had felt real, too, all the moments I’d been inside my friends’ heads, their bodies, their minds. And the moments when I hadn’t—the aftermath of these moments—Lisa taking too many pills, Kat drinking her chai tea, Will kissing me with passion.

I paid for the magazines and walked back to the atrium to
find Kelly. But the room was empty, so I walked back to the waiting room.

When I got there, I saw Beverly holding on to Kelly, Beverly sobbing. I pulled Kelly away, and Beverly fell onto Stan. “What happened?” I asked.

Kelly shook her head, as tears streamed down her face. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t. I hugged her, let her hold on to me, let her cry into my hair, until finally it was Stan who said it. “A stroke,” he whispered, as if the words didn’t make sense, even to him.