Exit Light (31 page)

“I’ve got to go,” she blurted as the floor threatened to slap her in the face. “I’m sorry.”

Lauren gave her a knowing look. “It’s shocking, isn’t it? Especially if you’re not expecting it. The doctors say it won’t be long now.” She stroked her fingers again across Ben’s cheek. “But he keeps hanging in there.”

Tovah had taken a few steps backward, toward the door. Ben’s wife. Ben was married.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

Lauren looked up. If the question surprised her, she was good at not showing it. “Do you really want to know?”

It was a perceptive question. Tovah respected her for it. She nodded.

“He started smelling things. Odors that had nothing to do with what was around him. And seeing things, too. He said they looked like dust bunnies in the corner of his vision. I told him to go to the doctor, but…” Lauren shrugged with the fond exasperation of a put-upon wife who’s been proven right and wished she had not. “He wouldn’t go. About ten months ago he had a seizure. The CAT scans showed what they called a shadow. By the time we got home that day, Ben was having vivid auditory and olfactory hallucinations. He kept hearing rushing water.”

Tovah didn’t know what to say, but Lauren didn’t seem to need a reply. She smoothed the blankets one last time and came around the bed. “The plan was to operate to remove the tumor, then give him extensive chemotherapy. He didn’t wake up from the operation. Though he could breathe without assistance, they told me without further resuscitative measures he’d be gone within a few months. A few days or a week, if I didn’t feed him.”

Lauren’s laugh was like the grinding of gears. “As if I could decide to allow him to starve to death. I arranged for hospice care. I thought it would be better to have him at home.”

Tovah wanted very much to sit, but she stabilized herself with a hand against the doorjamb. “Is there any chance he’ll ever wake up?”

Lauren hesitated. “I don’t think so. No. His eyes open sometimes. And once he spoke…”

Tovah waited, but Lauren stayed silent. “What did he say?”

Lauren’s mouth worked and at last a glint of tears showed up in her pale blue eyes. “Nobody believes me. Anyone I’ve told said I must have been dreaming.”

“Tell me,” Tovah urged softly.

“I’d fallen asleep by his bed. Early on I spent every night next to him. Now…” Lauren lifted her chin a bit. “Now I sleep in my own bed. But then I was sitting next to him. And he opened his eyes, the way he would’ve had something startled him. And he said something so odd I wonder if it really was a dream. It seems like it, now.”

Tovah’s fingers gripped the doorway.

Lauren’s soft laugh sounded forced. She looked up and then shrugged. The tears had vanished. “He said, ‘She’s a mermaid.’”

Tovah sighed, eyes closing against the tears she didn’t dare show.

“I left him, you know,” Lauren said matter-of-factly. “Just before it all happened. Things had been bad with us for a long time. We both made mistakes. But when he got sick, I put all that aside. I had to, didn’t I?”

A splinter from the door gouged Tovah’s palm, but she paid no attention to the thin sting. She mumbled something, another apology, an explanation…a series of nonsensical syllables that nevertheless seemed to satisfy Lauren, who nodded.

Ben’s wife looked at her, voice weary, resigned, but not bitter. “You didn’t go to college with my husband. Did you.”

Tovah backed out of the door, found the stairs, managed to get down them without falling.

In her car, bent over the wheel and hiding her face in her hands, she gave in to breathy hysterics. This was too much, all of it too much. Losing Spider, the tragedy with Edward. Not dreaming. Finding Ben.

She’d lost him in the dream world, and wished she’d never found him in the waking one. She’d kept no secrets from Ben. He’d done nothing but keep everything from her.

Time passed.

The divorce went through. Kevin made good on his word not to fight Tovah for a greater portion of the settlement from the insurance company. The check itself came and she looked at it for a long, long time before putting it back in the envelope to deposit later. Her life would be easier now. Simpler. Just her and her dog, enough money in the bank to make working for a living a possibility instead of working to barely make ends meet. She’d begun thinking about starting her own web design business, a job she could still do from home but which would give her more creative freedom.

If she dreamed at night, she still didn’t know it. She went to bed and woke with the vague, swirling sensation of having spent the night on storm-tossed seas, her stomach sick and head aching. But she couldn’t remember what, if anything, she’d dreamed.

Tovah combed the obituaries for notice of Ben’s death, and every day she didn’t see it she thought it would get easier for her to forgive him for keeping such an important truth from her. She thought of him often, trying to force her mind to hold on to the memories of time they’d spent, every word and gesture they’d ever shared. But, like dreams always had, those memories had started fading and slipping away. She’d lost Spider. She’d lost Martin. She was losing Ben, too.

Two months after Martin’s collapse, Tovah visited him at the Sisters of Mercy. He was on Five though not, thank goodness, in Henry’s old room. She wasn’t sure she could’ve handled that. No, Martin had been placed in a brighter room at the other end of the hall. New paint, new furniture. A silent television mounted to the wall. In the private bath, bottles of soap and shampoo, soft towels.

“How is he?” she asked Ava, who’d shown her to the room but now stood in the doorway, not approaching the bed.

“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” Ava said.

Tovah looked at her. “Hey.”

Ava shrugged. “Gives me the creeps. Seeing him like this. Of all the patients I’ve ever had—and believe me, we’ve had some real winners—Dr. Goodfellow is really the worst.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he shouldn’t be in here, that’s all. Guy like him should have someone, you know?” Ava snorted and looked her up and down. “Well, I guess he does, right? He has you.”

Tovah said nothing to that and looked over the room again, noting the small touches that made this one so much nicer than the others. “He must have someone to do all this.”

“All what?” Ava frowned.

Tovah gestured. “Make the room nice like this. Don’t tell me you did it.”

Ava’s face went blank and a slow tremor rippled over her. “I dunno what you’re talking about.”

“The—” The paint, the pictures, the flowers, the bedspread. Tovah touched it with her fingertips, the soft nubbly fabric. She looked around again, trying to see it through Ava’s eyes. “Never mind.”

Ava left then, and Tovah turned to the bed. She sat in the chair next to it and looked at Martin. She studied the slow rise and fall of his breathing. He looked thinner than he had. Instead of pajamas he wore a soft blue Henley and navy track pants. His hair had been cut too short. His eyes were closed.

“Martin?”

He didn’t answer, but she hadn’t expected him to. Tovah wasn’t sure she wanted him to. It hurt her heart to see him this way, even though she knew it was for the best. Not for him, maybe, but for everyone else.

That didn’t make her feel any better.

Much had faded but not the memory of those glass and razor wings, how it had felt to make…and break. She drew a deep breath and reached in her bag for a copy of an old and boring favorite.

“I hope you like Dickens,” she murmured, flipping to the first page of
The Pickwick Papers.

She read for a while until her throat got dry and then reached in her bag for a bottle of water. She caught a glance of Martin as she did—he hadn’t moved, but his eyes were open. She dropped the book. She took his hand.

And all at once, everything was gone but the bright green grass beneath her feet, both of them, and the blue sky overhead. Butterflies danced. A stream burbled. This was not her meadow, but it was the closest she’d come since that last time in the Ephemeros, the time when Henry died.

She covered her mouth with both hands at the sight of the spider on the rock. Belly banded with red and gold, it grew as she watched. Tovah cried out, running. “Spider!”

“It’s me, doll. Here I am. I told you, you can’t get rid of me.”

She hugged him, hard. “Oh, Henry. Spider. I thought you…”

“Shh,” Spider said. “It’s all right. I told you, didn’t I?”

“So what does this mean?” She laughed through tears and twirled, arms out. “What does all of it mean?”

“It means the next time you see Jim Morrison,” a familiar voice said, “you’d better ask for his autograph.”

Another figure stepped out from behind the rock. A tall man with sandy hair, a pair of brown cords and a blue shirt. Tovah didn’t run to greet him.

“Ben,” she said.

“Tovah. I’m sorry.”

Spider cleared his throat. “Tovahleh, it’s been a long time. We’ve been looking for you. We were worried.”

In the waking world she might’ve had to sit and put her head between her knees to combat the sudden lightheadedness pushing at her, but Tovah welcomed it here. She rubbed her bare feet in the grass and fought the tightness of emotion in her throat.

Tovah looked at Ben. “You should’ve told me the truth. I would’ve understood.”

Ben nodded. “I know. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know, myself, for a long time, and then when I did…I didn’t know what it meant.”

She looked around at everything they’d created and felt the effort they’d made to bring her here. To bring her back. She looked at the two men she loved, one a dear and constant friend and the other something else.

She held out her hand. Ben took it. It wasn’t time for a kiss and maybe never would be. She wasn’t a mermaid now. She stood on her own two feet.

“I didn’t think I’d ever make it back. I thought something was broken.”

“Something is broken,” Ben said quietly. He looked to the distance, where lightning ringed black mountains and the faint sound of thunder rumbled. “It’s been broken since you left.”

“Edward?”

Ben shook his head. “No sign of him, or the others. But things have shifted. Can’t you feel it?”

She could. Once the Ephemeros had been a swirling mass of gray smoke, easily formed and shaped to fulfill the desires of the sleepers who’d entered it. She tested herself, shaping a few flowers. A tree.

“I can’t tell if it’s harder to shape, or if it’s just me. Could be both.” She squeezed Ben’s fingers, feeling the warmth of his hand. “What’s it like for you?”

“There’s more blankness. It’s taking people time to recover. I can’t explain it better than that. For those of us who are here all the time, it’s harder to find each other.”

“But you found me,” Tovah said.

Ben smiled. “Yes. We did.”

More thunder rumbled, but it was far off and no threat to the three of them. At least not for now, and not in this haven. This special place.

“Tovahleh, doll. I’m so happy to see you I want to bust something,” Spider said, “but it’s time for you to go for now.”

“How do you always—”

But there was no time for her to finish, because, still laughing with joy, Tovah woke. She still held Martin’s hand. The room formed around her and she shook her head, laughter fading.

Ava stood in the doorway, arms crossed. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Tovah let go of Martin’s hand, his fingers cool and pliant. His eyes were closed again.

She stood, careful to keep her balance. She gathered her things. The room wasn’t so nice just now, the paint she’d thought so pristine now peeling a bit in the corners. Through the doorway to the bathroom she saw the fluffy white towels had shrunk. They’d be scratchy, those towels.

Tovah stood straight and looked at the man on the bed. She took the time to smooth his hair off his forehead and, though she hesitated, she put her mouth to his cheek to kiss it. She whispered into his ear.

“I’ll be back.”

And she would be, that was clear. Not just from guilt, or because Martin needed someone to care for him, but because somehow he’d become the conduit for Tovah’s return to the Ephemeros. She couldn’t explain it and wasn’t sure she cared. She’d felt what it was like to have the world unravel all around her. Now all that mattered was that for the first time in months everything felt like it was going to be all right. She didn’t miss the irony of not wanting to sit by another man’s silent bedside and yet discovering that it was the only way to get back to the Ephemeros. The land of dreams always granted what was needed, after all. As for what she wanted…

The rest would come in due time.

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